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•5* Vol. 7, No. SS4. Jan. 5,1884. Annual Subscripti on, $50.08.^ p 

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LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



.20 



1. Hyperion, Longfellow .20 

2. Outre-Mer, do .20 

3. The Happy Boy, Bjorn- 

son .' 10 

4. Arne, byBjtirnson ... .10 
6. Frankenstein, Shelley. .10 

6. Last of the Mohicans. .20 

7. Clytie, Joseph Hatton. .20 

8. The Moonstone, Par: 

9. The Moon-ione, Part II .10 
aO. Oliver Twisi, Dickens. .20 

11. Coming Race, Lytton. .10 

12. Leila, byLordLytU 

13. The Three Spaniards. . 

14. The Tricks of the 

Greeks Unveiled 20 

15. L'Abbe Constantir. . 

16. Freckles, by Redcliff. .20 

17. The Dark Colleen, Jay .20 

18. They were Married!.. .10 

19. Seekers after God 20 

20. The Spanish Nun 10 

21 . Green Mountain Boys .20 

22. Fleurette, Scribe 20 

23. Second Thoughts 20 

24. The New Magdalen... .20 

25. Divorce, Margaret Leo .20 

26. Life of Washington... .20 

27. Social Etiquette 15 

28. Single Heart and Dou- 
ble Face, Chas. Reade .10 

29. Irene, by Carl Detlef.. .20 

30. Vice Versa, F. Anstey .20 

31. Eruest Maltravers 20 

32. The Haunted House. .10 

33. John Halifax, Mulock .20 
84. 800 Leagues on the 

Amazon, by Verne.. .10 

35. The Cryptogram 10 

3d. Life of Marion 

87. Paul and Virginia 10 

33. Tale of Two Cities 20 

39. The Hermits, Kingsley .20 

40. An Adventure in 

Thule, and Marriage 
of M. Fergus, Black. .10 

41. Marriage in High Lin 

42. Robin, by Mrs. Pan:. 

43. Two on a Tower 20 

44. Rasselas, Dr. Johnson .10 

45. Alice; or. Mysteries.. .20 
40. Duke of Kandos 

47. Baron Munchausen.. .10 
43. A Princess of Thule. . . .20 

49. The Secret Despatch.. .20 

50. Early Days 1 of Chris- 

tianity 20 

Do., Part 11 

51. Vicar of Wakefield... .10 

52. Progress and Poverty. .20 

53. The*Spy, by Cooper.. .20 

54. East Lynne, Mrs Wood .20 
D5. A Strange Story„i . . .20 ■ 
50. AdarnBede,Eiiot,P'tI .15 

Do, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaff 
53. Portia, by The Di. , 

59. Last Days of Pou< 

60. The Two Duchesses... .20 



61. Tom Browne School 

Days. .20 

62. The Wooing O't, P.tl .15 
The Wooing O't, P't II .15 

03. TheVendeta. Balzac. .20 
C4. Hypatia, by Kingsley, .15 

Do., Partll 15 

6o. Selma, by Mrs. Smith. .15 
00. Margaret and her 

• Bridesmaids. . ' 20 

07. Horse Shoe Kobinson .15 

Do., Part II 15 

03. Gulliver's Travels 20 

69. Amos Barton, by Eliot .10 

70. The Berber, by Mayo. .20 

71. Silas Marner, by Eliot .10 

72. Queen of the County. . 20 

73. Life of Cromwell, Hood. 15 
7-1. JaueEyre, by Bronte. .20 
75. Child's Hist. England. .20 
70. Molly Bawn, Duchess .20 

77. Pillone, by BergsOe... .15 

78. Phyllis, The Duchess. .20 

79. Romola, Eliot, Parc.I. .15 
Romola, Eliot, Part II .15 

80. Science in Short Chap- 

ters . 20 

81. Zanoni, by Lytton!'.!! !20 

82. A Daughter of Heth... .20 

83. The Eight and v Wrong 

Uses of the Bible 20 

84. Night and Morning. . . .15 
Do.,Partn 15 

85. Shandon Bells, Black. .20 
80. Monica, The Duchess. .10 
87. Heart and Science 20 

p.e Golden Calf 20 

89. The Dean's Daughter. .20 

90. Mrs. Geoffrey .Duchess .20 

91. Pickwick Papers, P't I .20 
Do., Part II .20 

92. Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

93. Macleod of Dare 20 

94. Tempest Tossed 20 

Do.,PartH 20 

95. Letters from High Lat- 

itudes. Earl Dufferin .20 

96. Gideon Fleyce 20 

97. India and Ceylon 20 

98. The Gypsy Queen, 20 

99. The Admiral's' Ward.. .20 

100. Nimport, Bynnef , P't 1 .15 
Nimport, Part II...... .15 

101. Harry Holbrooke 20 

102. Tritons, Bynner.P'tl. .15 
Tritons, Part II 15 

103- Let Noth'g You Dismay. 10 
ndy Anoley's Secret. 20 

105. Woman's Place To-day .20 

106. Dunallan.by Kennedy .15 
Do., Part II 15 

107. Housekeeping and 

Horaemaking w .15 

108. No New Thing, Norris .20 

109. Spoopendyke Papers. .20 

110. False Hopes.. 15 

111. Labor and Capital.... .20 

112. Wanda; Ouida, Part I. .15 
Wanda, PaTt II..- 15 



113. More Words about 

the Bible 

114. Monsieur Lecoq, P't I 
Monsieur Lecoq, P'tH 

115. Outline of Irish Hist. 

116. The Lerouge Case. . .'. . 

117. Paul Clifford, Lytton. 

118. A New Lease of Life. . 

119. Bourbon Lilies 

120. Other People's Money 

121. The Lady of Lyon?, 

122. Ameliue du Bourg... 

123. A Sea Queen, Russell. 

124. The Ladies Lindores.. 

125. Haunted Hearts 

126. Loys, Lord Beresford. 

127. Under Two Flags 

Do. (Ouida), Part II... 

128. Money, Lord Lytton . . 

129. In Peril of his Life. . . 

130. India; What Can it 

Teach Us? M.Muller 

131. Jets and Flashes 

132. Moonshine and Mar- 

guerites 

133. Mr. Scarborough's 

Family 

Do., Part II 

134. Arden, Mary Robinson 

135. Tower of Percemont . .• 

136. Yolande, Wm. Black. 

137. Cruel London, Hatton 

138. The Gilded Clique. . . . 

139. Pike County Folks... 

140. Cricket on the Hearth 

141. Henry Esmond 

142. Strange Adventures of 

a Phaeton 

143. Denis Duval, Thack- 
* eray 

144. Old Cnriosity Shop 
Do., Part H 

145. Ivanhoe, Scott, P'tl. 
Do., Partll 

146. White Wings, Black. 

147. The Sketch Book..... 

148. Catherine, Thackeray 

149. Janet's Repentance.. 

150. Barnaby Rudge, P't I 
Barnaby Rudge, PtII 

151. Felix Holt, by Eliot.. 

152. Richelieu, by Lytton. 

153. Sunrise, Black, P't I. 
Do, PartH 

154. Tour of the World in 

Eighty Days, Verne 

155. Mystery of Orcival... 

156. Lovel, the Widower.. 

157. Romantic Adventure 

of a Milkmaid. Hard) 

158. David Copperfield.. . 
Do., Part II 

159. Charlotte Temple... 

160. Rienzi, Lytton, Part '. 
Do., Part II.. 

161. Promise of Marriage 

162. Faith and Unfaith. . 

163. The Happy Man 

164. Barry Lyndon 



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The subjects treated in this volume, which is the pro- 
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ROBERT BURNS. 



CHAPTER I. 
youth in ayrshire- 
Great men, great events, great epochs, it nas been said, 
grow as we recede from them ; and the rate at which they grow in 
the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. 
Tried by this standard, Burns must be great indeed; for, during 
the eighty years that have passed since his death, men's interest in 
the man himself and their estimate of his genius have been steadily 
increasing. Each decade since he died has produced at least two 
biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well-known essay 
on Burns in 1828, he could already number six biographies of the 
Poet, which had been given to the world during the previous thirty 
years ; and the interval between 1828 and the present day has added, 
in at least the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the 
man and in his circumstances that has attracted so much of the 
world's interest to Burns, I must make one more attempt to describe. 
If success were that which most secures men's sympathy, Burns 
would have won but little regard ; for in all but his poetry his was 
a defeated life — sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond 
the lives even of most poets. 

Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much failure and 
shipwreck were combined with such splendid gifts, that has attracted 
to him so deep and compassionate interest. Let us' review once 
more the facts of that life, and tell again its oft-told story. 

It was on the 25th of January, 1759, a bout two miles from the 
town of Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared bv his father's own 
hands, that Robert Burns was born. The " auld clay bigging " 
which saw his birth still stands by the side of the road that leads 
from Ayr to the river and the bridge of Doon. Between the banks 
of that romantic stream and the cottage is seen the roofless ruin 
of " Alloway's auld haunted kirk," which Tarn o' Shanter has made 
famous. His first welcome to the world was a rough one. As he 
himself says — • 

" A blast o' Janwar' win' 

Blew hansel in on Robin. 



BURNS. 

A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable of the 
cottage, and the poet and liis mother were carried in the dark 
morning to the shelter of a neighbour's roof, under which they 
remained till their own home was repaired. In after years he 
would often say, " No wonder that one ushered into the world amid 
such a tempest should be the victim of stormy passions." " It is 
hard to be born in Scotland," says the brilliant Parisian. Burns 
had many hardships to endure, but he never reckoned this to be 
one of them. 

His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt his name, 
was a native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardineshire, where he had 
been reared on a farm belonging to the forfeited estate of the noble 
but attainted house of Keith-Marischal. Forced to migrate thence 
at the asfe of nineteen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally 
settled in Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was 
born, he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' Doon, which 
he cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even 
stubborn integrity, and of strong temper — a combination which, as 
his son remarks, does not usually lead to worldly success. But his 
chief characteristic was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A 
peasant-saint of the old Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern 
Calvinism of the West with the milder Arminianism more common 
in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid all his after-errors, 
never ceased to revere his father's memory, has left an immortal 
portrait of him in The Cotter's Saturday Night, when he describes 
how 

" The saint, the father, and the husband prays." 

William Burness was advanced in years before he married, and 
his wife, Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is 
described as an Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, 
with bright eyes and intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good 
manners and easy address. Like her husband, she was sincerely 
religious, but of a more equable temper, quick to perceive character, 
and with a memory stored with old traditions, songs, and ballads, 
which she told or sang to amuse her children. In his outer man 
the poet resembled his mother, but his great mental gifts, if inherited 
at all, must be traced to his father. 

Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will always be 
remembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount 
Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel. 

Mount Oliphant. — This was a small upland farm, about two 
miles from the Brig o' Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging 
to Mr. Ferguson, of Doon-holm. who was also the landlord of 
William Burness' previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year 
when his father entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he 
had reached his eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1777. 
All the years between these two dates were to the family of Burness 
one long sore battle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. 
If the hardest toil and severe self-denial could have procured 



BURNS. 9 

success, they would not have failed. It was this period of his life 
which Robert afterwards described, as combining " the cheerless 
gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of galley-slave." The 
family did their best, but the niggard soil and bad seasons were too 
much* for them. At length, on the death of his landlord, who had 
always dealt generously by him, William Burness fell into the grip 
of a factor, whose tender mercies were hard. This man wrote 
letters which set the whole family in tears. The poet has not given 
his name, but he has preserved his portrait in colours which are 
indelible : 

" I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day, 
An' mony a time my heart's been wae, 
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, 
How they maun thole a factor's snash ; 
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse and swear, 
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear, 
While they maun stan', wi aspect humble, 
And hear it a', an' tremble." 

In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, " The farm 
proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and 
my father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. His 
spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a 
freedom in the lease in two years more ; and to weather these two 
years we retrenched expenses and toiled on." Robert and Gilbert, 
the two eldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown man's 
full work. Yet, for all their hardships, these Mount Oliphant days 
were not without alleviations. If poverty was at the door, there 
was warm family affection by the fireside. If the two sons had, 
long before manhood, to bear toil beyond their years, still they 
were living under their parents' roof, and those parents two of the 
wisest and best of Scotland's peasantry. Work was no doubt 
incessant, but education was not neglected — rather it was held one 
of the most sacred duties. When Robert was five years old, he 
had been sent to a school at Alloway Mill; and when the famdv 
removed to Mount Oliphant, his father combined with four of his 
neighbours to hire a young teacher, who boarded among them, and 
taught their children for a small salary. This young teacher, whose 
name was Murdoch, has left an interesting description of his two 
young pupils, their parents, and the household life while he 
sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time Murdoch thought that 
Gilbert possessed a livelier imagination, and was more of a wit than 
Robert. " All the mirth and liveliness," he says, " were with 
Gilbert. Robert's countenance at that time wore generally a grave 
and thoughtful look." Had their teacher been then told that one 
of his two pupils would become a great poet, he would have fixed 
on Gilbert. When he tried to teach them church music along with 
other rustic lads, they two lagged far behind the rest. Robert's 
voice especially was untuneable, and his ear so dull that it was with 
difficulty he could distinguish one tune from another. Yet this 



IO BURNS. 

was he who was to become the greatest song-writer that Scotland— 
perhaps the world — has known. In other respects the mental 
training of the' lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch 
taught them not only to read, but to parse, and to give the exact 
meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply 
ellipses, and to substitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How 
many of our modern village schools even attempt as much ! When 
Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the education of 
his children, and carried it on at night after work hours were over. 
Of that father Murdoch speaks as by far the best man he ever 
knew. Tender and affectionate towards his children he describes 
him, seeking not to drive, but to lead them to the right, by appeal- 
iag to their conscience and their better feelings, rather than to their 
fears. To his wife he was gentle and considerate in an unusual 
degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort; and she repaid it 
with the utmost reverence. She was a careful and thrifty house- 
wife ; but whenever her domestic tasks allowed, she would return 
to hang with devout attention on the discourse that fell from her 
wise husband. Under that father's guidance knowledge was sought 
for as hid treasure, and this search was based on the old and rever- 
ential faith that increase of knowledge is increase of wisdom and 
goodness. The readings of the household were wide, varied, and 
unceasing. Some one entering the house at meal-time found the 
whole family seated, each with a spoon in one hand and a book in 
the other. The books which Burns mentions as forming part of 
their reading at Mount Oliphant surprise us even now. Not only 
the ordinary school-books and geographies, not only the traditional 
life of Wallace, and other popular books of that sort, but The 
Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (Ids Homer included) 
Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's 
Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay's works, formed 
the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection of 
songs, of which Burns says, " This was my vade mecum. I pored 
over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, 
verse by verse ; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from 
affectation and fustian. 1 am convinced I owe to this practice 
much of my critic-craft, such as it is ! " And he could not have 
learnt it in a better way. 

There are few countries in the world which could at that time 
have produced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such 
a father as William Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a coun- 
try which could rear such men among its peasantry should give 
birth to such a poet as Robert Burns to represent them. The 
books which fed his young intellect were devoured only during in- 
tervals snatched froni hard toil. That toil was no doubt excessive. 
And this early overstrain showed itself soon in the stoop of his 
shoulders, in nervous disorder about the heart, and in frequent 
fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much has sometimes been 
made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns's boyhood had 
been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in so kindly 



BURNS. n 

an atmosphere of wisdom and home affection, under the eye of such 
a father and mother, cannot be called unblest. 

Under the pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns 
might, have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that 
he has reen pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth sum- 
mer there came to him a new influence, which at one touch un- 
locked the springs of new emotions. This incident must be given 
in his own words : " You know," he says, " our country custom of 
coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of 
the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching 
creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English 
denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you 
know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. 
In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that 
delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse 
prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of 
human joys here below ! How she caught the contagion I cannot 
tell. . . . Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to 
loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our 
labors ; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like 
J an vEoIian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious 
ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out 
the cruel nettle-strings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring 
qualities, she sung sweetly ; and it was her favorite reel to which 
I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so 
presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed 
ones, composed by men who read Greek and Latin ; but my girl 
sung a song which was said to be composed by a country laird's 
son, on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love ; and 
I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he ; for, except- 
ing that he could shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in 
the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus 
with me began love and poetrv." 

The song he then composed is entitled " Handsome Nell," 
and is the first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very 
puerile and silly — a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which 
I cannot agree. Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch 
of that grace which bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse 
which, for directness of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly 
ever surpassed : 

" She dresses aye sae clean and neat, 
Baith decent and genteel, 
And then there's something in her gait 
Gars ony dress look weel." 

" I composed it," says Burns, " in a wild enthusiasm of passion, 
and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood 
sallies at the remembrance." 

Lochlea. — Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some 
remnant of means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant 



12 BURNS. 

to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton (1777); an upland, undulat- 
ing farm, on the north bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, 
southward over the hills of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of 
Arran, Ailsa Craig, and down the Firth of Clyde, toward the West- 
ern Sea. This was the home of Burns and his family from his 
eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a time the family life 
here was more comfortable than before, probably because several 
of the children were now able to assist their parents in farm labour. 
"These seven years," says Gilbert Burns, " brought small literary 
improvement to Robert" — but I can hardly believe this, when we 
remember that Lochlea saw the composition of The Death and 
Dying Words of Poor Mailie, and of My Nannie, O, and one or two 
more of his most popular songs. It was during those days that 
Robert, then growing into manhood, first ventured to step beyond the 
range of his father's control, and to trust the promptings of his own 
social instincts and headlong passions. The first step in this di- 
rection was to go to a dancing-school, in a neighbouring village, that 
he might there meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic 
manners " a brush," as he phrases it. The next step was taken 
when Burns resolved to spend his nineteenth summer in Kirkos- 
wald, to learn mensuration and surveying from the schoolmaster 
there, who was famous as a teacher of these things. Kirkoswald, 
on the Carrick coast, was a village full of smugglers and adven- 
turers, in whose society Burns was introduced to scenes of what 
he calls " swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It ma}- readily 
be believed that, with his strong love of sociality and excitement, 
he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration went on, 
till one day, when in the kailvard behind the teacher's house, Burns 
met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end to men 
suration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning— 

"Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns 
Bring autumn's pleasant weather" — 

"the ebullition," he calls it, "of that passion which ended the 
school business at Kirkoswald." 

From this time on for several years, love-making was his chief 
amusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells 
us that he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish of 
Tarbolton, and was never without at least one of his own. There 
was not a comelv girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a 
song, and then he, made one which included them all. When he 
was thus inly moved, "the agitations of his mind and body," says 
Gilbert, " exceeded anything of the kind I ever knew in real life. 
He had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than 
himself, or had more consequence. His love, therefore, rarely 
settled on persons of this description." The jealousy here noted, 
as extending even to his loves, was one of the weakest point of the 
poet's character. Of the ditties of that time, most of which have 
been preserved, the best specimen is My Nannie, O. This song, 



BURNS. I3 

and the one entitled Mary Morison, render the wnoie scenery and 
sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at once graphic and 
free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that 
those gloamin' trysts, however they may touch the imagination and 
lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much that 
degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry. 

But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free from 
peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brother 
Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, " used to speak of his brother 
as at this period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any 
other. He recalled with delight the days when they had to go with 
one or two companions to cut peats for the winter fuel ; because 
Robert was sure to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty 
remarks on men and things, mingled with the expressions of a 
genial, glowing heart, and the whole perfectly free from the taint 
which he afterwards acquired from his contact with the world. 
Not even in those volumes which afterwards charmed his country 
from end to end, did Gilbert see his brother in so interesting a 
light as in these conversations in the bog, with only two or three 
noteless peasants for an audience." 

While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love-makings 
were at this time unceasing, he asserts that they were "governed 
by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty, from which he never 
deviated till he reached his twenty-third year." It was towards 
the close of his twenty-second that there occurs the record of his 
first serious desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his 
affections on ayoung woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a 
small farmer, and at that time servant in a family on Cessnock 
Water, about two miles from Lochlea. She is said to have been 
not a beauty, but of unusual liveliness and grace of mind. Long 
afterwards, when he had seen much of the world, Burns spoke of 
this young woman as, of all those on whom he ever fixed his fickle 
affections, the one most likely to have made a pleasant partner for 
life. Four letters which he wrote to her are preserved, in which he 
expresses the most pure and honourable feelings in language which, 
if a little formal, is, for manliness and simplicity, a striking contrast 
to the bombast of some of his later epistles. Songs, too, he ad- 
dressed to her — The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonnie Peggy Ali- 
son, and Mary Morison. The two former are inconsiderable ; the 
latter is one of those pure and beautiful love-lyrics, in the manner 
of the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says, "take the deepest and 
most lasting hold on the mind." 

" Yestreen, when to the trembling string, 

The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha', 
To thee my fancy took its wing, 

I sat, but neither heard nor saw: 
Tho' this was fair, and that was hraw, 

And yon the toast of a' the town, 
I sigh'd, and said amang them a', 

' Ye are na Mary Morison.' " 



I 4 BURA'S. 

" Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, 

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die ; 
Or canst thou break that heart of his, 

Whase only faut is loving thee ? 
If love for love thou wilt na gie, 

At least be pity to me shown; 
A thought ungentle canna be 

The thought o' Mary Morison 

In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first time un- 
deniably revealed. 

But neither letters nor love-songs prevailed. The young 
woman, for some reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties ; and 
the rejection of this his best affection fell on him with a malign in- 
fluence, just as he was setting his face to learn a trade which he 
hoped would enable him to maintain a wife. 

Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, and as 
Robert and his brother raised flax on their farm, they hoped that if 
they could dress as well as grow flax, they might thereby double 
their profits. As he met with this heavy disappointment in love 
just as he was setting out for Irvine, he went thither down-hearted 
and depressed, at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time 
were struck with his look of melancholy, and his moody silence, 
from which he roused himself only when in pleasant female so- 
ciety, or when he met with men of intelligence. But the persons 
of this sort whom he met in Irvine were probably few. More nu- 
merous were the smugglers and rough-living adventurers with 
which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, swarmed. Among these 
he contracted, says Gilbert, " some acquaintance of a freer manner 
of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose society 
prepared him for overleaping the bonds of rigid virtue which had 
hitherto restrained him." One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life 
and loose and irregular habits, had a wonderful fascination for 
Burns, who admired him for what he thought his independence and 
magnanimity. " He was," says Burns, " the only man I ever knew 
who was a greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding 
star; but he spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I 
had regarded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mis- 
chief." 

Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religi- 
ous views of Burns were too rigid and uncompromising, induced 
him to adopt " more liberal opinions," which in this case, as in so 
many others, meant more lax opinions. With his principles of 
belief, and his rules of conduct at once assailed and undermined, 
what chart or compass remained any more for a passionate being 
like Burns over the passion-swept sea of life that lay before him? 
The migration to Irvine was to him the descent to Avernus, from 
which he never afterwards, in the actual conduct of life, however 
often in his hours of inspiration, escaped to breathe again the pure 
upper air. This brief but disastrous Irvine sojourn was brought to 
a sudden close. Burns was robbed by his partner in trade, his flax* 



BURNS. 



*5 



dressing shop was burnt to the ground by fire during the carousal 
of a New-Year's morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, 
and in character, returned to Lochlea to find misfortunes thicken- 
ing round his family, and his father on his death-bed. For the old 
man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad 
seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early 
in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was 
one of his children of whose future he could not think without fear. 
Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside and asked, 
" O father, is it me you mean ? " The old man said it was. Robert 
turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and 
his bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, almost to 
bursting. The father had early perceived the genius that was in 
his boy, and even in Mount Oliphant clays had said to his wife, 
" Whoever lives to see it, something extraordinary will come from 
that boy." He had lived to see and admire his son's earliest poetic 
efforts. But he had also noted the strong passions, with the weak 
will, which might drive him on the shoals of life. 

Mossgiel. — Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother, 
seeing clearly the crash of family affairs which was impending, had 
taken on their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, 
about two or three miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of 
Mauchline. When their father died in February, 1 784, it was only by 
claiming the arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their 
father's creditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck to 
stock their new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, 
and their younger brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their 
new home was a bare, upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay soil, lying 
within a mile of Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm 
resolution to be prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, 
" I read farming books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, 
and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should 
have been a wise man ; but the first year, from unfortunately buy- 
ing bad seed — the second, from a late harvest, we lost half our 
crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned like a dog to 
his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the 
mire." Burns was in the beginning of his twenty-sixth year when 
he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where he remained for four 
years. Three things those years and that bare moorland farm 
witnessed — the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the revelation of 
his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character as a man. 
The result of the immoral habits and " liberal opinions " which he 
had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of which he 
speaks in his Epistle to John Rankine with such unbecoming 
levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful to 
read on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his 
father's headstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the saem 
time, the epistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same 
strain, in which the defiant poet glories in his shame. It was well 
for the old man that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these 



1 6 BURNS. 

things befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the burden, 
and to receive in her home and bring up the child that should not 
have been born. When silence and shame would have most be- 
come him, Burns poured forth his feelings in ribald verses, and 
bitterly satirised the parisli minister, who required him to undergo 
that public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time 
exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame at- 
tached to the minister, who merely carried out the'rules which his 
Church enjoined. It was no proof of magnanimity in Burns to use 
his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothing more than 
his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost heat he 
must have been visited with other and more penitential feelings 
than those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well 
observed, " his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates 
know how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still 
small voice; and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease 
within himself escaped — as may be often traced in the history of 
satirists — in angry sarcasms against those who. whatever their 
private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong." Mr. 
Carlyle's comment on this crisis of his life is too weighty to be 
omitted here. " With principles assailed by evil example from 
without, by ' passions raging like demons ' from within, he had little 
need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the 
battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He 
loses his feeling of innocence ; his mind is at variance with itself ; 
the old divinity no longer presides there ; but wild Desires and 
wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has 
committed himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, 
dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even 
conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge con- 
sists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of 
lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him, broken only by 
the red lightnings of remorse." Amid this trouble it was but a 
poor vanity and miserable love of notoriety which could console 
itself with the thought — 

" The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, 
E'en let them clash." 

Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach ? 
This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, 
and the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at 
once launched Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy 
that was at that time raging all around him. The clergy of the 
West were divided into two parties, known as the Auld Lights and 
the New Lights. Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been 
the stronghold of Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit ; 
and in Burns's day — a century and a half after the Covenant 
— a large number of the ministers still adhered to its principles, 
and preached the Puritan theology undiluted. These men wero 



BURNS. 17 

democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout protesters against 
Patronage, which has always been the bugbear of the sects in 
Scotland. As Burns expresses it, they did their best to stir up 
their flocks to 

"Join their counsel an r l their skills 
To cowe the lairds, 
An' get the brutes the power themsels 
To chuse their herds/' 

All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of 
those who wished to resist patronage and " to cowe the lairds," had 
not this natural tendency.been counteracted by a stronger bias draw- 
ing him in an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though demo- 
crats in Church politics, were the upholders of that strict Church 
discipline under which he was smarting, and to this party belonged 
his own minister, who had brought that discipline to bear upon 
him. Burns, therefore, naturallyt hrew himself into the arms of 
the apposite, or New Light party, who were more easy in their life 
and in their doctrine. This large and growing section of ministers 
were deeply imbued with rationalism, or, as they then called it, 
"common-sense," in the light of which they pared away from re- 
ligion all that was mysterious and supernatural. Some of them 
were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of them shone 
less in the pulpit than at the festive board. With such men a 
person in Burns's then state of mind would readily sympathise, and 
they received him with open arms. Nothing could have been more 
unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he should have 
fallen into intimacy -with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men. 
They were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly educa- 
tion with whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with the 
sallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonished them by his keen in- 
sight and vigorous powers of reasoning. They abetted those very 
tendencies in his nature which required to be checked. Their coun- 
tenance, as clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings he 
might otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder recklessness 
whatever profanity he might be tempted to indulge in. When he 
had let loose his first shafts of satire against their stricter brethren, 
those New Light ministers heartily applauded him : and hounded 
him on to still more daring assaults. He had not only his own 
quarrel with his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, 
but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a 
county lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of 
Church ordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. 
Burns espoused Gavin's cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly 
new arrows one after another from his satirical quiver. 

The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was 
The Twa Herds, or the Holy Tulzie, written on a quarrel between 
two brother clergymen. Then followed in quick succession Holy 
Willie's Prayer, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair. His good 
mother and his brother were pained by these performances, and 



1 8 BUKNS. 

remonstrated against them. But Burns, though he generally gave 
ear to their counsel, in this instance turned a cieaf ear to it, and lis- 
tened to the other advisers. The love of exercising his strong 
powers of satire and the applause of his boon-companions, lay and 
clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his own better nature and 
the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may be urged in 
defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot but think 
that those who have loved most what is best in Burns's poetry must 
have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some have 
commended them on the ground that they have exposed religious 
pretence and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this 
way is perhaps doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scot- 
land is not doubtful, in that they have connected in the minds of 
the people so many coarse and even profane thoughts with objects 
which they had regarded ti.l then with reverence. Even The Holy 
Fair, the poem in this kind which is least offensive, turns on the 
abuses that then attended the celebration of the Holy Communion 
in rural parishes, and with great power portrays those gatherings 
in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as Lockhart has well re- 
marked, those things were part of the same religious system which 
produced the scenes which Burns had so beautifully described in 
The Cotter's Saturday Night. Strange that the same mind, almost 
at the same moment, should have conceived two poems so different 
in spirit as The Cotter's Saturday Night and The Holy Fair ! 

I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may 
not have again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn 
to the other poems of the same period. Though Burns had entered 
on Mossgiel resolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered 
that it was not in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 
1784 and 1785 both failed, and their failure seemed to have done 
something to drive him in on his own internal resources. He then 
for the first time seems to have awakened to the conviction that his 
destiny was to be a poet ; and he forthwith set himself, with more 
resolution than he ever showed before or after, to fulfil that mis- 
sion. Hitherto he had complained that his life had been without 
an aim ; now he determined that it should be so no longer. The 
dawning hope began to gladden him that he might take his place 
among the bards of Scotland, who, themselves mostly unknown, 
have created that atmosphere of minstrelsy which envelopes and 
glorifies their native country. This hope and aim is recorded in an 
entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date of August, 
1784: 

" However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, 
particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent 
Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland, their 
towns, rivers, woods, and haughs, immortalised in such celebrated 
performances, while my dear native country — the ancient bailieries 
of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and 
modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants — a coun- 
try where civil, and particularly religious liberty, have ever found 



BURNS. 



19 



their first support, and their last asylum — a country, the birthplace 
of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the 
scene of many important events recorded in Scottish history, par- 
ticularly a great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the 
saviour of his country — yet we have never had one Scotch poet of 
any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic wood- 
lands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy mountainous 
source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, 
Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy ; but, alas ! I 
am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and in education. 
Obscure I am, obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young 
soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine." 

Though the sentiment here expressed may seem commonplace 
and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals 
the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It 
was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later 
day in his Epistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House. 

" E'en then, a wish, I mind its power, 
A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave mv breast, 
That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I tnrn'd the weeder-clips aside, 
• An' spar'd the symbol dear." 

It was nbout his twenty-fifth year when he first conceived the 
ope that he might become a national poet. The failure of his first 
two harvests, 1784 and '85, in Mossgiel, may well have strength- 
ened this desire, and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was 
not to succeed as a farmer, might he not find success in another 
employment that was much more to his mind ? 

And this longing, so deeply cherished, he had, within less than 
two years from the time that the above entry in his diary was writ- 
ten, ample fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May, 1786, the 
fountains of poetry wereunsealed within, and flowed forth in a con- 
tinuous stream. That period, so prolific of poetry that none like it 
ever afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the 
satirical poems already noticed, and of another more genial satire, 
Death and Dr. Hornbook, but also of those characteristic epistles 
in which he reveals so much of his own character, and of those 
other descriptive poems in which he so wonderfully delineates the 
habits of the Scottish peasantry. 

Within from sixteen to eighteen months were composed, not 
only seven or eight long epistles to rhyme-composing brothers in 
the neighbourhood, David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but ah 
so, H allow ten % To a Mouse, The Jolly Beggars, The Cotter's 
Saturday Night, Address to The Deil, The Auld Farmer's Ad- 



2 o BURNS. 

dress to his Auld Mare, The Vision, The Twa Dogs, The Moun- 
tain Daisy- The descriptive poems above named followed each oth- 
er in rapid succession during that spring-time of his genius, having 
been all composed, as the Tatest edition of his works shows, in a 
period of about six months, between November, 1785, and April 1786. 
Perhaps there are none of Burns's compositions which give the 
real man more naturally and unreservedly than his epistles. Writ- 
ten in the dialect he had learnt by his father's fireside, to friends in 
his own station, who shared his own tastes and feelings, they flow 
on in an easy stream of genial, happy spirits, in which kindly 
humour, wit, love of the outward world, knowledge of men, are all 
beautifully intertwined into one strand of poetry, unlike anything 
else that has been seen before or since. The outward form of the 
verse and the style of diction are no doubt after the manner of his 
two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay and Fergus- 
son ; but the play of soul and power of expression, the natural grace 
with which they rise and fall, the vividness of every image, and 
transparent truthfulness of every sentiment, are all his own. If 
there is any exception to be made to this estimate, it is in the 
grudge which here and there peeps out against those whom he 
thought greater favourites of fortune than himself and his corres- 
pondents. But taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to 
be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one 
friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice 
or disguise. And the broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly 
fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it 
in " curious felicity." Often when harvests were failing and the 
world going against him, he found his solace in pouring forth in 
rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says in of these 
same epistles — 

" Lceze me on rhyme ! it's aye a treasure, 
My chief, amiast mv only pleasure, 
At hame, a-fiel', at wark, at leisure, 

The Muse, poor hizzie ! 
ho' rough an' raploch be her measure, 
She's seldom lazy." 

Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, I shall 
speak in the sequel. The garret in which all the poems of this 
period were written is thus described by Chambers : " The farm- 
house of Mossgiel, which still exists almost unchanged since the 
days of the poet, is very small, consisting of only two rooms, a but 
and a ben, as they are called in Scotland. Over these, reached by 
a trap stair, is a small garret, in which Robert and his brother used 
to sleep. Thither, when he had returned from his day's work, the 
poet used tQ retire, and seat himself at a small deal table, lighted 
by a narrow sky-light in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he. 
had composed in the fields. His favourite time for composition 
was at the plough. Long years afterwards his sister Mrs. Uegg, 



BURNS. 21 

used to tell how, when her brother had gone forth again to field 
work, she would steal up to the garret and search the drawer 
of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newly trans- 
cribed." 

In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspic- 
uous it might not be easy to determine. But there can be little 
question about the justice of Lockhart's remark, that " The Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night is of all Burns's pieces the one whose ex- 
clusion from the collection would be most injurious, if not to the 
genius of the poet, at least to the character of the man. In spite 
of many feeble lines, and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me 
that even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being con- 
templated in the absence of this poem, than of any other single 
poem he has left us." Certainly it is the one which has most 
endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest of his coun- 
trymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that this poem, in 
which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finely touched, 
and the image of his own religious father so beautifully portrayed, 
should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly at the 
same time The yollv Beggars, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair. 

During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the 
times were hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have 
found poetry to be as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like 
his required some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the 
pressure of dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and 
noblest excitement. In two other more hazardous forms of ex- 
citement he was by temperament disposed to seek refuge. These 
were conviviality and love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert 
says that lie indulged little, if at all. during his Mossgiel period. 
And this seems proved by his brother's assertion that during all that 
time Robert's private expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a 
year. When he had dressed himself on this, and procured his 
other necessaries, the margin that remained for drinking must have 
been small indeed. But love-making — that had been with him, 
ever since he reached manhood, an unceasing employment. Even 
in his later teens he had, as his earliest songs show, given himself 
enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings, which were then and 
are still customary among the peasantry of Scotland, and which at 
the best are full of perilous temptation. But ever since the time 
when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook the paths of innocence, 
there is nothing in any of his love-affairs which those who prize 
what was best in Burns would not willingly forget. If here we 
allude to two such incidents, it is because they are too intimately 
bound up with his life to be passed over in any account of it. Gil- 
bert says that while "one generally reigned paramount in Robert's 
affections, he was frequently encountering other attractions, which 
formed so many underplots in the drama of his love." This is only 
too evident in those two loves which most closely touched his des- 
tiny at this time. 

From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent allusions 



22 BURNS, 

occur in his letters and poems to flirtations with the belles of the 
neighbouring village of Mauchline. Among all these Jean An 
mour the daughter of a respectable master-mason in that village, 
had the chief place in his affections. All through 1785 their court- 
ship had continued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular mar- 
riage, with a written acknowledgment of it, had to be effected. 
Then followed the father's indignation that his daughter should be 
married to so wild and worthless a man as Burns ; compulsion of 
his daughter to give up Burns, and to destroy the document 
which vouched their marriage; Burns's despair driving him to 
the verge of insanity ; the letting loose by the Armours of the 
terrors of the law against him ; his skulking for a time in con- 
cealment ; his resolve to emigrate to the West Indies, and become 
a slave-driver. All these things were passing in the spring months 
of 1786, and in September of the same year Jean Armour became 
the mother of twin children. 

It would be well if we might believe that the story of his be- 
trothal to Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to have thought, 
previous to and independent of the incidents just mentioned. But 
the more recent investigations of Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Cham- 
bers have made it too painfully clear that it was almost at the very 
time when he was half distracted by Jean Armour's desertion of 
him, and while he was writing his broken-hearted Lament over her 
conduct, that there occurred, as an interlude, the episode of Mary 
Campbell. This simple and sincere-hearted girl from Argyllshire 
was, Lockhart says, the object of by far the deepest passion Burns 
ever knew. And Lockhart gives at length the oft-told tale how, 
on the second Sunday of May, 1786, they met in a sequestered 
spot by the banks of the River Ayr, to spend one day of parting 
love ; how they stood, one on either side of a small brook, laved 
their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible between them, 
vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then parted, never 
again to meet. In October of the same year Mary came from 
Argvllshire, as far as Greenock, in the hope of meeting Burns, but 
she was there seized with a malignant fever which soon laid her in 
an early grave. 

The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on that part- 
ing day, has been recently recovered. On the first volume is in- 
scribed, in Burns's hand, ''And ye shall not swear by My Name 
falsely, I am the Lord. Levit. 19th chap. 12th verse ;" and on the 
second volume, " Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform 
unto the Lord thine oath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse." But the 
names of Mary Campbell and Robert Burns, which were originally 
inscribed on the volumes, have been almost obliterated. It has 
been suggested by Mr. Scott Douglas, the most recent editor who 
has investigated anew the whole incident, that, "in the whirl of 
excitement which soon followed that Sunday, Burns forgot his vow 
to poor Mary, and that she, heart-sore at his neglect, deleted the 
names from this touching memorial of their secret betrothal." 
Certain it is that in the very next month, June, 1786, we find 



BURNS. 2% 

Burns, in writing to one of his friends about " poor, ill-aavised, 
ungrateful Armour," declaring that, " to confess a truth between 
you and me, 1 do still love her to distraction after all, though I 
won't tell her so if I were to see her." And Chambers even sug- 
gests that there was still a third love interwoven, at this very time, 
in the complicated web of Burns's fickle affections. Burns, though 
he wrote several poems about Highland Mary, which afterwards 
appeared, never mentioned her name to any of his family. Even 
if there was no more in the story than what has been here given, 
no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfast- 
ness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, 
should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden 
of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. 

" Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? 
Hear'st thou the pangs that rend his breast ? 

The misery of his condition, about the time when Highland 
Mary died, and the conflicting feelings which agitated him, are 
depicted in the following extract from a letter which he wrote prob- 
ably about October, 1786, to his friend Robert Aiken : 

" There are many things that plead strongly against it [seeking 
a place in the Excise]: the uncertainty of getting soon into busi- 
ness; the consequences of my follies, which perhaps make it im- 
practicable for me to stay at home ; and, besides, 1 have been for 
some time pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which 
you pretty well know — the pang of disappointment, the sting of 
pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to 
settle on my vitals like vultures when attention is not called away 
by the calls of society or the vagaries of the Muse. Even in the 
hour of social mirth, my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated 
criminal under the hands of the executioner. All these reasons 
urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have only one 
answer — the feelings of a father. This, in the present mood I am 
in, overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale against it. 
You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a senti- 
ment which strikes home to my very soul ; though sceptical in some 
points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for 
the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present exist- 
ence : if so, then how should I, in the presence of that tremendous 
Being, the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches 
of those who stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I 
deserted in the smiling innocency of helpless infancy ? Oh, Thou 
great unknown Power ! Thou Almighty God ! who hast lighted up 
reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality ! I have fre- 
quently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the 
perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken 
me. . . ." 

" You see, sir, that if to know one's errors were a probability 



24 



BURA'S. 



of mending them, I stand a fair chance ; but, according to the 
reverend Westminster divines, though conviction must precede 
conversion, it is very far from always implying it." 

This letter exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had been 
tossed during the last six months before it was written. He had 
by his own conduct wound round himself complications from which 
he could not extricate himself, yet which he could not but poign- 
antly feel. One cannot read of the " wandering stabs of remorse " 
of which he speaks, without thinking of Highland Mary. 

Some months before the above letter was written, in the April 
of the same year, at the time when he first fell into trouble with 
Jean Armour and her father, Burns had resolved to leave his coun- 
try and sail for the West Indies. He agreed with a Mr. Douglas 
to go to Jamaica and become a book-keeper on his estate there. 
But how were funds to be got to pay his passage-money? His 
friend Gavin Hamilton suggested that the needed sum might be 
raised, if he were to publish by subscription the poems he had 
lying in his table-drawer. 

Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was resolved 
on. His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, Aiken and Bal- 
lantyne of Ayr, Muir and Parker of Kilmarnock, and others — 
all did their best to get the subscription lists quickly filled. 
The last-named person put down his own name for thirty-five 
copies. The printing of them was committed to John Wiison, a 
printer in Kilmarnock, and during May, June, and July of 1786, the 
work of the press was going forward. In the interval between 
the resolution to publish and the appearance of the poems, dur- 
ings his distraction about Jean Armour's conduct, followed by the 
episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his own dark feel- 
ings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell from him— the 
lines on The Mountain Daisy, The Lament, the Odes to Despon- 
dency, and to Ruin. And yet so various were his moods, so 
versatile his powers, that it was during that same interval that he 
composed, in a very different vein, The Twa Dogs, and probably 
also his satire of The Holy Fair. The following is the account 
the poet gives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch 
of himself which he communicated to Dr. Moore : 

" I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of 
rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw light was a bur- 
lesque lamentation of a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists ; 
both of them were dramatis persona' in mv Holy Fair. I had a 
notion myself that the piece had some merit ; but to prevent the 
worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend who was fond of such things, 
and told him that I could not guess who was the author of it, but 
that I thought it pretty clever. With a certain description of the 
clergy, as well as the laity, it met with a roar of applause. 

"Holy Willie's Prayer next made its appearance, and alarmed 
the Kirk Session so much, that they held several meetings to look 
over their spiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be pointed 
against profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wandering led me 



BURNS. 25 

on another side, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal. 
This is the unfortunate incident which gave rise to my printed 
poem, The Lament . This was a most melancholy affair, which I 
cannot yet bear to reflect on, and had very nearly given me one or 
two of 'the principal qualifications for a place among those who 
have lost the chart and mistaken the reckoning of Rationality. 

" I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what 
little preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leav- 
ing my native country for ever, I resolved to publish my poems. 
I weighed my productions as impartially as was in my power ; I 
thought they had merit ; and it was a delicious idea that I should 
be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my 
ears — a poor negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable 
clime, and gone to the world of spirits ! I can truly say, that 
pawure inconnu as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea 
of my works as I have at this moment, when the public has de- 
cided in their favour. . . . 

" I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscrip- 
tions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly 
gratified by the reception I met with from the public ; and besides, 
I pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty ponnds. This 
sum came very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, 
for want of money, to procure a passage. As soon as 1 was master 
of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took 
a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, 
for 

• Hungry ruin had me in the wind.' 

" I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under 
all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled 
the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last 
farewell of my friends ; my chest was on the way to Greenock ; I 
had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, 
' The gloomy night is gathering fast] when a letter from Dr. Black- 
wood to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up 
new prospects to my poetic ambition." 

It was at the close of July, while Burns was, according to his 
own account, " wandering from one friend's house to another," t<£ 
avoid the jail with which he was threatened by Jean Armour's 
father, that the volume appeared, containing the immortal poems 
(1786). That Burns himself had some true estimate of their real 
worth is shown by the way in which he expresses himself in his 
preface to his volume. 

Ushered in with what Lockhart calls a "modest and manly 
preface," the Kilmarnock volume went forth to the world. The 
fame of it spread at once like wild-fire throughout Ayrshire and the 
parts adjacent. This is the account of its reception given by Robert 
Heron, a young literary man, who was at that time living in the 
Stewartry of Kirkcudbright : — " Old and young, high and low, grave 
and gay,'learned or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, trans- 



36 BUKNS. 

ported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to 
Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even ploughboys and maid- 
servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned most 
hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if 
they might procure the works of Burns." The edition consisted of 
six hundred copies — three hundred and fifty had been subscribed 
for before publication, and the remainder seems to have been sold 
off in about two months from their first appearance. When all ex- 
penses were paid, Burns received twenty pounds as his share of 
the profits. Small as this sum was, it would have more than 
sufficed to convey him to the West Indies ; and, accordingly, with 
nine pounds of it he took a steerage passage in a vessel which was 
expected to sail from Greenock at the beginning of September. 
But from one cause or another the day of sailing was postponed, 
his friends began to talk of trying to get him a place in the Excise, 
his fame was rapidly widening in his own country, and his powers 
were finding a response in minds superior to any which he had 
hitherto known. Up to this time he had not associated with any 
persons'of a higher grade than the convivial lawyers of Mauchline 
and Ayr, and the mundane ministers of the New Light school. 
But now persons of every rank were anxious to become acquainted 
with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman, for it was by that name 
he now began to be known, just as in the next generation another 
poet of as humble birth was spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. 
The first persons of a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship 
of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop. The 
former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician, one 
of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at the close 
of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to be pass- 
ing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns's 
farm, and having been made acquainted with the poet's works and 
character by Mr. Mackenzie, the surgeon of Mauchline, he in- 
vited the poet and the medical man to dine with him at Catrine. 
The day of this meeting was the 23rd of October, only three days 
after that on which Highland Mary died. Burns met on that day 
not only the professor and his accomplished wife, but for the first 
time in his life dined with a live lord — a young nobleman, said to 
have been of high promise, Lord Daer, eldest son of the then Earl 
of Selkirk. He had been a former pupil of Dugald Stewart, and 
happened to be at that time his guest. Burns has left the following 
humorous record of his own feelings at that meeting : 

" This wot ye all whom it concerns, 
I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns, 

October twenty-third, 
A ne'er to be forgotten day, 
Sae far I sprachled up the brae [clambered], 

I dinner'd \vi' a Lord. 
****** 

" But wi' a Lord! stand out my shin, 
A Lord — a Peer, an Earl's Son ! 



BURNS. 27 

Up higher yet my bonnet ! 
And sic a lord! lang Scotch ells twa, 
Our Peerage he o'erlooks them a', 

As i look o'er a sonnet. 

" But oh for Hogarth's magic power ! 

To show Sir Bardie's willyart glower [bewildered], 
And how he stared and stammered, 
When goaven, as if led in branks [moving stupidly], 
And stumpin' on his ploughman shanks, 
He in the parlour hammered. 

" I sidling sheltered in a nook, 

An' at his Lordship steal't a look 
Like some portentous omen ; 
Except good sense and social glee, 
An' (what surprised me) modesty, 
I marked nought uncommon. 

"I watched the symptoms o' the great, 
The gentle pride, the lordly state, 
The arrogant assuming ; 
The fient a pride, nae pride had he, 
Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see, 

Mair than an honest ploughman." 

From this record of that evening given by Burns, it is interest- 
ing to turn to the impression made on Professor Stewart by the 
their first interview. He says : 

" His manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, 
simple, manly, and independent: strongly expressive of conscious 
genius and worth, but without anything that indicated forwardness, 
arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in conversation, but not 
more than belonged to him ; and listened with apparent attention 
and deference on subjects where his want of education deprived 
him of the means of information. If there had been a little more 
of gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would, I think, 
have been still more interesting: but he had been accustomed to 
give law in the circle of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread 
of anything approaching to meanness or servility rendered his 
manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothing, perhaps, was more 
remarkable among his various attainments than the fluency, and 
precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in com- 
pany ; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expres- 
sion, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, the 
peculiarities of Scottish phraseology." 

Burns parted with Dugald Stewart, after this evening spent 
with him in Ayrshire, to meet him again in the Edinburgh coteries, 
amid which the professor shone as a chief light. 

Not less important in the history of Burns was in the first intro- 
duction to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, a lady who continued the con- 
stant friend of himself and of his family while she lived. She was 
said to be a lineal descendent of the brother of the great hero of 
Scotland, William Wallace. Gilbert Burns gives the following ac- 



28 BURNS. 

count of the way in which his brother's acquaintance with this lady 
began : 

" Of all the friendships, which Robert acquired in Ayrshire or 
elsewhere, none seemed more agreeable to him than that of Mrs. 
Dunlop of Dunlop, nor any which has been more uniformly and 
constantly exerted in behalf of him and his family, of which, were 
it proper, I could give many instances. Robert was on the point 
of setting out for Edinburgh before Mrs. Dunlop heard of him. 
About the time of my brother's publishing in Kilmarnock, she had 
been afflicted with a long and severe illness, which had reduced 
her mind to the most distressing state of depression. In this sit- 
uation, a copy of the printed poems was laid on her table by a 
friend ; and happening to open on The Cotter's Saturday Night, 
she read it over with the greatest pleasure and surprise ; the poet's 
description of the simple cottagers operation on her mind like the 
charm of a powerful exorcist, expelling the demon ennui, and re- 
storing her to her wonted inward harmony and satisfaction. Mrs. 
Dunlop sent off a person express to Mossgiel, distant fifteen or 
sixteen miles, with a very obliging letter to my brother, desiring 
him to send her half a dozen copies of his poems, if he had them 
to spare, and begging he would do her the pleasure of calling at 
Dunlop House as soon as convenient. This was the beginning of a 
correspondence which ended only with the poet's life. Nearly the 
last use he made with his pen was writing a short letter to this lady 
a few days before his death." 

The success of the first edition of his poems naturally made 
Burns anxious to see a second edition begun. He applied to his 
Kilmarnock printer, who refused the venture, unless Burns could 
supply ready money to pay for the printing This he could 
not do. But the poems by this time had been read and admired 
by the most cultivated men in Edinburgh, and more than one word 
of encouragement had reached him from that city. The earliest of 
these was contained in a letter from the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock, 
to whom Mr. Laurie, the kindly and accomplished minister of Lou- 
doun, had sent the volume. This Mr. Laurie belonged to the more 
cultivated section of the moderate party in the Church, as it was 
called, and was the friend of Dr. Hugh Blair, Principal Robertson, 
and Dr, Blacklock, and had been the channel through which Mac- 
pherson's fragments of Ossian had first been brought under the no- 
tice of that literary circle, which afterwards introduced them to the 
world. The same worthy minister had, on the first appearance of 
the poems, made Burns's acquaintance, and had received him with 
warm-hearted hospitality. This kindness the poet acknowledged, 
on one of the visits to the manse of Loudoun, by leaving in the 
room in which he slept a short poem of six very feeling stanzas, 
which contained a prayer for the family. This is the last stanza— 

" When soon or late they reach that coast, 
O'er life's rough ocean driven, 
May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, 
A family in heaven I " 



BURNS. 29 

As soon as Mr. Laurie received the letter from Dr. Blacklock, 
written on the 4th September, in which warm admiration of the 
Kilmarnock volume was expressed, he forwarded it to Burns at 
Mossgiel. The result of it fell like sunshine on the young poet's 
heart ; for, as'he says, " The doctor belonged to a set of critics for 
whose applause I had not dared to hope." The next word of ap- 
proval from Edinburgh was a highly appreciative criticism of the 
poems, which appeared in a number of The Edinburgh Magazine 
at the beginning of November. Up till this time Burns had not 
abandoned his resolution to emigrate to the West Indies. But the 
refusal of the Kilmarnock printer to undertake a new edition, and 
the voices of encouragement reaching him from Edinburgh, com- 
bining with his natural desire to remain, and be known as a poet, 
in his native. country, at length made him abandon the thought of 
exile. On the 1 8th November we find him writing to a friend, 
that he had determined on Monday or Tuesday, the 27th or 28th 
November, to set his face toward the Scottish capital and try his 
fortune there. 

At this stage of the poet's career, Chambers pauses to speculate 
on the feelings with which the humble family at Mossgiel would 
hear of the sudden blaze of their brother's fame, and of the change 
it had made in his prospects. They rejoiced, no doubt, that he was 
thus rescued from compulsory banishment, and were no way sur- 
prised that the powers they had long known him to possess had 
at length won the world's admiration. If he had fallen into evil 
courses, none knew it so welt as they, and none had suffered more 
by these aberrations. Still, with all his faults, he had always been 
to them a kind son and brother, not loved the less for the anxieties 
he had caused them. But the pride and satisfaction they felt in 
his newly-won fame would be deep, not demonstrative. For the 
Burns family were a shy, reserved race, and like so many of the 
Scottish peasantry, the more they felt, the less they would express. 
In this they were very unlike the poet, with whom to have a feeling 
and to express it were almost synonymous. His mother, though 
not lacking in admiration of her son, is said to have been chiefly 
concerned lest the praises of his genius should make him forget 
the Giver of it. Such may have been the feelings of the poet's 
family. 

What may we imagine his own feeling to have been in this crisis 
of his fate ? The thought of Edinburgh society would naturally 
stir that ambition which was strong within him, awaken a desire to 
meet the men who were praising him in the capital, and to try his 
powers^ in that wider arena, ft might be that in that new scene 
something might occur which would reverse the current of his for- 
tunes, and set him free from the crushing poverty that had hitherto 
kept him down. Anyhow, he was conscious of strong powers, 
which fitted him to shine, not in poetry only, but in conversation 
and discussion ; and, ploughman though he was, he did not shrink 
from encountering any man or any set of men. Proud, too, we 
know he was, and his pride often showed itself in jealousy and sus* 



3<> 



BURNS. 



picion of the classes who were socially above him, until such feel- 
ings were melted by kindly intercourse with some individual man. 
belonging to the suspected orders. He felt himself to surpass in 
natural powers those who were his superiors in rank and fortune, 
and he could not, for the life of him, see why they should be full 
of this world's goods, while he had none of them. He had not yet 
learned — he never did learn — that lesson, that the genius he had 
received was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his wisdom 
lay in making the most of this rare inward gift, even on a meagre 
allowance of the world's external goods. But perhaps, whether he 
knew it or not, the greatest attraction of the capital was the secret 
hope that in that new excitement he might escape from the demons 
of remorse and despair which had for many months been dogging 
him. He may have fancied this, but the pangs which Burns had 
created for himself were too deep to be in this way permanently 
put by. 

The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affections that 
he had abused in himself and in others who had trusted him. The 
course he had run since his Irvine sojourn was not of a kind to give 
peace to him or to any man. A coarse man of the world might have 
stifled the tender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone 
on his way uncaring that his conduct — 

" Hardened a' within, 
And petrified the feeling." 

But Burns could not do this. The heart that had responded so 
feelingly to the sufferings of lower creatures, the unhoused mouse. 
the shivering cattle, the wounded hare, could not without shame 
remember the wrongs he had done to those human beings whose 
chief fault was that they had trusted him not wisely but too well. 
And these suggestions of a sensitive heart, conscience was at hand 
to enforce — a conscience wonderfully clear to discern the right 
even when the will was least able to fulfil it. The excitements of 
a great city, and the loud praises of his fellow-men, might enable 
him momentarily to forget, but could not permanently stifle inward 
voices like these. So it was with a heart but ill at ease, bearing 
dark secrets he could tell to no one, that Burns passed from his 
Ayrshire cottage into the applause of the Scottish capital. 



BURNS 



3* 



CHAPTER II. 

FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 

The journey of Burns trom Mossgiel to Edinburgh was a sort 
of triumphal progress. He rode on a pony, lent him by a friend, and 
as the journey took two-days, his resting-place the first night was 
at the farm-house of Covington Mains, in Lanankshire, hard by the 
Clyde. The tenant of this farm, Mr. Prentice, was an enthusi- 
astic admirer of Burns's poems, and had subscribed for twenty 
copies of the second edition. His son, years afterwards, in a letter 
to Christopher North, thus describes the evening on which Burns 
appeared at his father's farm : — "All the farmers in the parish had 
read the poet's then published works, and were anxious to see him. 
They were all asked to meet him at a late dinner, and the signal of 
his arrival was to be a white sheet attached to a pitchfork, and put 
on the top of a'corn-stack in the barn-yard. The parish is a beau- 
tiful amphitheatre, with the Clyde winding through it — Wellbrae 
Hill to the west, Tinto Hill and the Culter Fells to the south, and 
the pretty, green, conical hill, Ouothquan Law, to the east. My 
father's stack-vard, lying in the centre, was seen from every house 
in the parish. At length Burns arrived, mounted on a borrowed 
■pownie. Instantly was the white flag hoisted, and as instantly were 
seen the farmers issuing from their houses, and converging to the 
point of meeting. A glorious evening, or rather night, which bor- 
rowed something from" the morning, followed, and the conversation 
of the poet confirmed and increased the admiration created by his 
writings. On the following morning he breakfasted with a large party 
at the' next farm-house, tenanted by James Stodart; . . . took lunch 
with a large partvat the bank in Carnwath, and rode into Edinburgh 
that evening on the pownie, which he returned to the owner in a few 
days afterwards by John Samson, the brofherof the immortal Tarn." 
'This is but a sample of the kind O: receptions which were 
henceforth to await Burns wherever his coming was known. If 
such welcomes were pleasing to his ambition, they must have been 
trying both to his bodily and his mental health. 

Burns reached Edinburgh on the 28th of November, 1786. 
The one man of note there with whom he had any acquaintance 
was Professor Dugald Stewart, whom, as already mentioned, he 
had met in Ayrshire. But it was not to him or to any of his 



32 



BURNS. 



reputation that he first turned; but he sought refuge with John 
Richmond, an old Mauchline acquaintance, who was humbly lodged 
in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket. During the whole of his first 
winter in Edinburgh, Burns lived in the lodging of this poor lad, 
and shared with him his single room and bed, for which they paid 
three shillings a week. It was from this retreat that Burns was 
afterwards to go forth into the best society of the Scottish capital, 
and thither, after those brief hospitalities were over, he had to 
return. For some days after his arrival in town, he called on no 
one — letters of introduction he had none to deliver. But he is said 
to have wandered about alone, "looking down from Arthur's Seat, 
surveying the place, gazing at the Castle, or looking into the 
windows of the booksellers' shops, where he saw all books of the 
day, save the poems of -the Ayshire Ploughman." He found his 
way to the lowly grave of Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed 
the sod ; he sought out the house of Allan Ramsay, and on entering 
it, took off his hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast a 
glance at the capital to which he had come, and the society he 
was about to enter. 

Edinburgh at that time was still adorned by a large number of 
the stars of literature, which, although none of those then living 
may have reached the first magnitude, had together made a galaxy 
in the northern heavens, from the middle till the close of last 
century. At that time literature was well represented in the 
University. The Head of it was Dr. Robertson, well known as 
the historian of Charles V., and as the author of other historic 
works. The chair of Belles-Letters was filled by the accomplished 
Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best samples 
of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid style, both of 
sentiment and criticism, which then flourished throughout Europe, 
and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another still greater or- 
nament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of 
Moral Philosophy, whose works, if they have often been surpassed 
in depth and originality of speculation, have seldom been equalled 
for solid sense and polished ease of diction. The professors at 
that time were most of them either taken from the ranks of the 
clergy, or closely connected with them. 

Among the literary men unconnected with the University, by 
far the greatest name, that of David Hume, had disappeared about 
ten years before Burns arrived in the capital. But his friend, Dr. 
Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, still lingered. 
Mr. Henry Mackenzie, " The Man of Feeling," as he was called 
from his best known, work, was at that time one of the most 
polished as well as popular writers in Scotland. He was then 
conducting a periodical called the Lounger, which was acknowl- 
edged as the highest tribunal of criticism in Scotland, and was not 
unknown beyond it. 

But even more influential than the literary lights of the Univer- 
sity were the magnates of the Bench and Bar. During the eight- 
eenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth, the Scottish 



BURNS. 



33 



Bar was recruted a most entirely from the younger sons of ancient 
Scottish families. To the patrician feelings which they brought 
with them from their homes these men added that exclusiveness 
which clings to a profession claiming for itself the highest place in 
the city where they resided. Modern democracy has made rude 
inroads on what was formerly something of a select patrician 
caste. But the profession of the Bar has never wanted either 
then or in more recent times some genial and original spirits who 
broke through the crust of exclusiveness. Such, at the time of 
Burns's advent, was Lord Monboddo, the speculative and humor- 
ous judge, who in his own way anticipated the theory of man's de- 
scent from the monkey. Such, too, was the genial and graceful 
Henry Erskine, the brother of the Lord Chancellor of that name, 
the pride and the favourite of his profession — the sparkling and 
ready wit who, thirteen years before the day of Burns, had met the 
rude manners of Dr. Johnson with a well-known repartee. When 
the Doctor visited the Parliament House, Erskine was presented 
to him by Boswell, and was somewhat gruffly received. After 
having made his bow, Erskine slipped a shilling into Boswell's 
hand, whispering that it was for the sight of his bear ! 

Besides these two classes, the occupants of the Professorial 
chair and of the Bar, there still gathered every winter in Edin- 
burgh a fair sprinkling of rank and beauty, which had not yet 
abandoned the Scottish for the English capital. The leader at 
that time in gay society was the well-known Duchess of Gordon — 
a character so remarkable in her day that some rumour of her still 
lives in Scottish memory. The impression made upon her by 
Burns and his conversation shall afterwards be noticed. 

Though Burns for the first day or two after his arrival wandered 
about companionless, he was not left long unfriended. Mr. Dal- 
rvmple, of Oramjefielcl. an Ayrshire country gentleman, a warm- 
hearted man. and a zealous Freemason, who had become acquaint- 
ed with Burns during the previous summer, now introduced the 
Ayrshire bard to his relative, the Earl of Glencairn. This noble- 
man, who had heard of Burns from his Ayrshire factor, welcomed 
him in a very friendly spirit, introduced him to his connexion, 
Henry Erskine, and also recommended him to the good offices of 
Creech, at that time the first publisher in Edinburgh. Of Lord 
Glencairn, Chambers says that " his personal beauty formed the 
index to one of the fairest characters." As long as he lived he 
did his utmost to befriend Burns, and on his death, a few years 
after this time, the poet, who seldom praised the great unless he 
respected and loved them, composed one of his most pathetic 
elegies. 

It was not, however, to his few Ayrshire connexions only, Mr. 
Dalrymple, Dugald Stewart, and others, that Burns was indebted 
for his introduction to Edinburgh society. His own fame was 
now enough to secure it. A criticism of his poems, which ap- 
peared within a fortnight after his arrival in Edinburgh, in the 
Lounger, on the 9th of December, did much to increase his rep- 



34 * BURNS. 

utation. The author of that criticism was The Man of Feeling, and 
to him belongs the credit of having been the first to claim that 
Burns should be recognised as a great original poet, not relatively 
only, in consideration of {he difficulties he had to struggle with, 
but absolutely on the ground of the intrinsic excellence of his 
work. He pointed to his power of delineating manners, of paint- 
ing the passions, and of describing scenery, as all bearing the 
stamp of true genius ; he called on his countrymen to recognise 
that a great national poet had arisen amongst them, and to appre- 
ciate the gift that in him had been bestowed upon their generation. 
Alluding to his narrow escape from exile, he exhorted them to 
retain and to cherish this inestimable gift of a native poet, and to 
repair, as far as possible, the wrongs which suffering or neglect 
had inflicted on him. The Lounger had at that time a wide circu- 
lation in Scotland, and penetrated even to England. It was known 
and read by the poet Cowper, who, whether from this or some 
other source, became acquainted with the poems of Burns within 
the first year of their publication. In Jul}', 1787, we find the poet 
of The Task telling a correspondent that he had read Burns's 
poems twice; "and though they be written in a language that is 
new to me ... I think them, on the whole, a very extraordinary 
production. He is. I believe, the only poet these kingdoms have 
produced in the lower lank of life since Shakespeare (I should 
rather say since Prior), who need not be indebted for any part of 
his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, and the dis- 
advantages under which he has laboured." Cowper thus endorses 
the verdict of Mackenzie in almost the same language. 

It did not, however, require such testimonials, from here and 
there a literary man, however eminent, to open every hospitable 
door in Edinburgh to Burns. Within a month after his arrival in 
town he had been welcomed at the tables of all the celebrities — 
Lord Monboddo, Robertson, the historian, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dugald 
Stewart, Dr. Adam Ferguson, The Man of Feeling, Mr. Fraser 
Tytler, and many others. We are surprised to find that he had 
been nearly two months in town before he called on the amiable 
Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who in his well-known letter to Dr. 
Laurie had been the first Edinburgh authority to hail in Burns 
the rising of a new star. 

How he bore himself throughout that winter when he was the 
chief lion of Edinburgh, society many records remain to show, both 
in his own letters and in the reports of those who met him. On 
the whole, his native good sense carried him well through the 
ordeal. If he showed for the most part due respect to others, he 
was still more bent on maintaining his respect for himself : indeed, 
this latter feeling was pushed even to an exaggerated indepen- 
dence. As Mr. Lockhart has expressed it, he showed, '• in the 
whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the 
most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to 
be, hardly deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of be- 
ing flattered." All who heard him were astonished by his wonder- 



BURNS. 



35 



ful powers of conversation. These impressed them, they say, with 
a greater sense of his genius than even his finest poems. 

With the ablest men that he met he held his own in argument, 
astonishing all listeners by the strength of his judgment, and the 
keenness of his insight both into men and things. And when he 
warmed on subjects which interested him, the boldest stood amazed 
at the flashes of his wit, and the vehement flow of his impassioned 
eloquence. With the " high-born ladies " he succeeded even bet- 
ter than with the " stately patricians " — as one of those dames her- 
self expressed it, fairly carrying them off their feet by the defer- 
ence of his manner, and the mingled humour and pathos of his 
talk. 

It is interesting to know in what dress Burns generally ap- 
peared in Edinburgh. Soon after coming thither he is said to 
have laid aside his country clothes for "a suit of blue and buff, 
the livery of Mr. Fox, with buckskins and top-boots." How he. 
wore his hair will be seen immediately. There are several well- 
known descriptions of Burns's manner and appearance during his 
Edinburgh sojourn, which, often as they have been quoted, cannot 
be passed by in any account of his life. 

Mr. Walker, who met him for the first time at breakfast in the 
house of Dr. Blacklock, says, " I was not much struck by his first 
appearance. His person, though strong and well-knit, and much 
superior to what might be expected in a ploughman, appeared to 
be only of the middle size, but was rather above it. His motions 
were firm and decided, and, though without grace, were at the 
same time so free from clownish constraint as to show that he had 
not always been confined to the society of his profession. His 
countenance was not of that elegant cast which is most frequent 
among the upper ranks, but it was manly and intelligent, and 
marked bv a thoughtful gravity which shaded at times into stern- 
ness. In his large dark eye the most striking index of his genius 
resided. It was full of mind. . . . He was plainly but properly 
dressed, in a style midway between the holiday costume of a farmer 
and that of the company with which he now associated. His 
black hair without powder, at a time when it was generally worn, 
was tied behind, and spread upon his forehead. Had I met him 
near a seaport, I should have conjectured him to be the master of 
a merchant vessel. ... In no part of Ins manner was there the 
slightest affectation ; nor could a stranger have suspected, from 
anything in his behaviour or conversation, that he had been for 
some months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of the 
metropolis. In conversation he was powerful. His conceptions and 
expressions were of corresponding vigour, and on all subjects were 
as remote as possible from commonplaces. Though somewhat au- 
thoritative, it was in a way which gave little offence, and was readily 
imputed to his inexperience in those modes of smoothing dissent and 
softening assertion, which are important characteristics of polished 
manners. 

"The day after my first introduction to Burns, I supped with 



36 BUJiNS. 

him at Dr. Blair's. The other guests were few, and as they had 
come to meet Burns, the Doctor endeavoured to draw him out, 
and to make him the central figure of the group. Though he there- 
fore furnished the greatest proportion of the conversation, he did 
no more than what he saw evidently was expected. From the 
blunders often committed by men of genius Burns was unusually 
free ; yet on the present occasion he made a more awkward slip 
than any that are reported of the poets or mathematicians most 
noted for absence of mind. Being asked from which of the public 
places he had received the greatest gratification, he named the 
High Church, but gave the preference as a preacher to the colleague 
of our worthy entertainer, whose celebrity rested on his pulpit 
eloquence, in a tone so pointed and decisive' as to throw the whole 
company into the most foolish embarrassment ! '! Dr. Blair, we are 
told, relieved their confusion by seconding Burns's praise. The 
poet saw his mistake, but had the good sense not to try to repair it. 
Years afterwards he told Professor Walker that he had never 
spoken of this unfortunate blunder, so painful to him had the re- 
membrance of it been. 

There seems little doubt, from all the accounts that have been 
preserved, that Burns in conversation gave forth his opinions with 
more decision than politeness. He had not a little of that mistaken 
pride not uncommon among his countrymen, which fancies that gen- 
tle manners and consideration for others' feelings are marks of 
servility. He was for ever harping on independence, and this be- 
trayed him into some acts of rudeness in society which have been 
recorded with perhaps too great minuteness. 

Against these remarks, we must set the testimony of Dugald 
Stewart, who says : "The attentions he received from all ranks and 
descriptions of persons would have turned any head but his own. 
I cannot say that I perceived any unfavourable effect which they 
left on his mind. He retained the same simplicity which had 
struck me so forcibly when first I saw him in the country, nor did 
he seem to feel an}' additional self-importance from the number and 
rank of his new acquaintance. He walked with me in spring, 
earlv in the morning, to the Braid Hills, when he charmed me still 
more bv his private conversation than he had ever done in com- 
pany. He was passionately fond of the beauties of nature ; and 
he once told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of 
our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages 
gave a pleasure to his mind which none could understand who had 
not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which they 

contained The idea which his conversation conveyed of the 

powers of his mind exceeded, if possible, that which is suggested 
by his writings. All his faculties were, as far as I could judge, 
equally vigorous, and his predilection for poetry was rather the re- 
sult of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a 
genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. I 
should have pronounced him fitted to excel in whatever walk of 
ambition he had chosen. . . . The remarks he made on the charac 



BURNS. 



37 



ters of men were snrewd and pointed, thougn irequently inclining 
too much to sarcasm. His praise of those he loved was sometimes 
indiscriminate and extravagant. . . . His wit was ready, and al- 
ways impressed with the. marks of a vigorous understanding ; but, 
to my taste, not often pleasing or happy." 

While the learned of his own day were measuring him thus 
coolly, and forming their critical estimates of him, youths of the 
younger generation were regarding him with far other eyes. Of 
Jeffrey, when a lad in his teens, it is recorded that one day in the 
winter of 17S6-S7, as he stood on the High Street of Edinburgh, 
staring at a man whose appearance struck him, a person at a shop 
door tapped him on the shoulder and said, " Aye, laddie, ye may 
weel look at that man. That's Robbie Burns." This was the 
young critic's first and last look at the poet of his country. 

But the most interesting of all the reminiscences of Burns, dur- 
ing his Edinburgh visit, or, indeed, during any other time, was the 
day when young Walter Scott met him and received from him that 
one look of approbation. 

This is the account of that meeting which Scott himself gave 
to Lockhart : " As for Burns, I may truly say, ' Virgiluim vidi tan- 
tiim.' I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw 
him one day at the late venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. 
Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The only 
thing I remembered which was remarkable in Burns's manner, was 
the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, represent- 
ing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on 
one side — on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. 
These lines were written beneath : 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain — 
Bent o'er the babe, her e)t dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

"Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed 
tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody 
but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem 
of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of The Justice of 
Peace. I whispered my information to a friend present, who men- 
tioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which 
though of mere civility, I then received with very great pleasure. 
His person was strong and robust; his manner rustic, not clownish ; 
a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity. His countenance was 
more massive than it looks in any of the portraits, I would have 
taken the poet, had I not known who he was, for a very sagacious 
country farmer of the old Scotch school — the douce gudcman who 
held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and 
shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated 
the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a 



38 BVR.VS. 

dark cas., which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke 
with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human 
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my 
time." 

While men of the upper ranks, old and young, were thus receiv- 
ing their impressions, and forming their various estimates of Burns, 
he, we m ly be sure, was not behind-hand in his reflections on them, 
and on himself. He had by nature his full share of that gnawing 
self-con:, ciousness which haunts the irritable tribe, from which no 
modern poet but Walter Scott has been able wholly to escape. 
While he was bearing himself thus manfully to outward appearance, 
inwardly he was scrutinising himself and others with a morbid sen- 
sitiveness. In the heyday of his Edinburgh popularity, he writes 
to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted friends, what he repeats 
to other correspondents, that he had long been at pains to take a 
true measure of himself and to form a just estimate of his powers ; 
that this self-estimate was not raised by his present success, nor 
would it be depressed by future neglect ; that though the tide of 
popularity was now at full flood, he foresaw that the tbb would 
soon set in, and that he was prepared for it. In the same letters 
he speaks of his having too much pride for servility, as though 
there was no third and more excellent way ; of " the stubborn pride 
of his own bosom," on which he seems mainly to have relied. In- 
deed, throughout his life there is much talk of what Mr. Carlyle 
well calls the altogether barren and unfruitful principle of pride ; 
much prating about "a certain fancied rock of independence " — a 
rock which he found but a poor shelter when the worst ills of life 
overtook him This feeling reached its height when, soon after 
leaving Edinburgh, we find him writing to a comrade in the bitter- 
ness of his heart that the stateliness of Edinburgh patricians and 
the meanness of Mauchline plebeians had so disgusted him with his 
kind, that he had bought a pocket copy of Milton to study the 
character of Satan, as the great exemplar of "intrepid, unyielding 
independence.*' 

If during his stay in Edinburgh, his "irascible humour" never 
went so far as this, " the contumely of condescension *' must have 
entered pretty deeply into the soul of the proud peasant when he 
made the following memorable entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 
1787. After some remarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and 
the hazard of losing men's respect by being too confidential with 
friends, he goes on : " For these reasons, I am determined to make 
these pages my confidant. I will sketch every character that any 
way strikes me, to the best of my power, with unshrinking justice. 
I will insert anecdotes and take down remarks, in the old law 
phrase, without feud or favour. ... I think a lock and key a 
security at least equal to the bosom of any friend whatever. My 
own private story likewise, my love adventures, my rambles; the 
frowns and smiles of fortune on my hardship; my poems and frag- 
ments, that must never see the light, shall be occasionally inserted. 
In short, never did four shillings purchase so much friendship, 



BL T RNS. 



39 



since confidence went first to the market, or honesty was set up for 
sale. . . . 

"There are few of the sore evils under the sun give me more 
uneasiness and chagrin, than the comparison how a man of genius, 
nay, of avowed worth, is received everywhere, with the reception 
which a mere ordinary character, decorated with the trappings and 
futile distinctions of fortune, meets : I imagine a man of abilities, 
his breast glowing with honest pride, conscious that men are born 
equal, still giving honour to whom honour is due ; he meets at a 
great man's table a Squire Something or a Sir Somebody ; he knows 
the noble landlord at heart gives the bard, or whatever he is, a 
share of his good wishes, beyond, perhaps, any one at the table ; 
yet how will it mortify him to see a fellow whose abilities would 
scarcely have made an eightpenny tailor, and whose heart is not 
worth three farthings, meet with attention and notice that are with- 
held from the son of genius and poverty ! 

" The noble Glencairn has wounded me to the soul here, be- 
cause I dearly esteem, respect, and love him. He showed so much 
attention, engrossing attention, one day, to the only blockhead at 
table (the whole company consisted of his lordship, dunder-pale, 
and mvself), that I was within half a point of throwing down my 
gage of contemptuous defiance, but he shook my hand and looked 
so benevolently good at parting, God bless him ! though I should 
never see him more, I shall love him to my dying day ! I am pleased 
to think I am so capable of gratitude, as f am miserably deficient 
in some other virtues." 

Lockhart, after quoting largely from this Common-place Book, 
adds, " This curious document has not yet been printed entire. An- 
other generation will, no doubt, see the whole of the confession." 
All that remains of it has recently been given to the world. The 
original design was not carried out, and what is left is but a frag- 
ment, written chiefly in Edinburgh, with a few additions made at 
Ellisland. The only characters which are sketched are those of 
Blair, Stewart, Creech, and Greenfield. The remarks on Blair, if not 
very appreciative, are mild and not unkindly. There seems to be 
irony in the praise of Dugald Stewart for the very qualities in which 
Burns probably thought him to be deficient. Creech's strangely 
composite character is well touched off. Dr. Greenfield, the col- 
league of Dr. Blair, whose eloquence Burns on an unfortunate oc- 
casion preferred to that of his host, alone comes in for an unaffected 
eulogy. The plain and manly directness of these prose sketches is 
in striking contrast to the ambitious flights which the poet attempts 
in many of his letters. 

Dugald Stewart in his cautious way hints that Burns did not 
always keep himself to the learned circles which had welcomed 
him. but sometimes indulged in " not very select society." How 
much this cautious phrase covers may be seen by turning to 
Heron's account of some of the scenes in which Burns mingled. 
Tavern life was then in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, more or less 
habitual in all classes. In those clubs and brotherhoods of the 



40 BURNS. 

middle class, which met in taverns down the closes and wynds of 
High Street, Burns found a welcome, warmer, freer, more con- 
genial than any vouchsafed to him in more polished coteries. 
Thither convened when their day's work was done, lawyers, wri- 
ters, schoolmasters, printers, shop-keepers, tradesmen — ranting, 
roaring boon- companions — who gave themselves up, for the time, 
to coarse songs, rough raillery, and deep drinking. At these meet- 
ings all restraint was cast to the winds, and the mirth drove fast 
and furious. With open arms the clubs welcomed the poet to their 
festivities ; each man proud to think that he was carousing with 
Robbie Burns. The poet the while gave full vein to all his im- 
pulses, mimicking, it is said, and satirising his superiors in posi- 
tion, who, he fancied, had looked on him coldly, paying them off 
by making them the butt of his raillery, letting loose all his varied 
powers, wit, humor, s?tire, drollery, and throwing off from time to 
time snatches of licentious song, to be picked up by eager listeners 
— song wildly defiant of all the proprieties. The scenes which 
Burns there took part in far exceeded any revelries he had seen in 
the clubs of Tarbolton and Mauchline, and did him no good. If 
we may trust the testimony of Heron, at the meetings of a certain 
Crochallan club, and at other such uproarious gatherings, he made 
acquaintances who, before that winter was over, led him on from 
tavern dissipations to still worse haunts and habits. 

By the 21st of April (1787), the ostensible object for which 
Burns had. come to Edinburgh was attained, and the second edition 
of his poems appeared in a handsome octavo volume. The pub- 
lisher was Creech, then chief of his trade in Scotland. The vol- 
ume was published by subscription "for the sole benefit of the 
author," and the subscribers were so numerous that the list of 
them covered thirty-eight pages. In that list appeared the names 
of many of the chief men of Scotland, some of whom subscribed 
for twenty — Lord Eglinton for as many as forty-two copies. Cham- 
bers thinks that full justice has never been done to the liberality 
of the Scottish public in the way they subscribed for this volume. 
Nothing equal to the patronage that Burns at this time met with 
had been seen since the days of Pope's Iliad. This second edi- 
tion, besides the poems which had appeared in the Kilmarnock 
one, contained several additional pieces, the most important of 
which had been composed before the Edinburgh visit. Such were 
Death and Doctor Hornbook, The Brigs of Ayr, The Ordination, 
The Address to the Unco Guid. The proceeds from this volume 
ultimately made Burns the possessor of about 500/., quite a little 
fortune for one who, as he himself confesses, had never before 
had 10/. he could call his own. It would, however, have been 
doubly welcome and useful to him, had it been paid down without 
needless delay. But unfortunately this was not Creech's way of 
transacting business, so that Burns was kept for many months 
waiting for a settlement — months during which he could not, for 
want of money, turn to any fixed employment, and which were 
therefore spent by him unprofitably enough. 



BURAS. 



41 



CHAPTER III. 

BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 

Some small instalments of the profits of his new volume en- 
abled our Poet, during the summer and autumn of 1787, to make 
several tours to various districts of Scotland, famous either for 
scenery or song. The day of regular touring had not yet set in, 
and few Scots at that time would have thought of visiting what 
Burns called the classic scenes of their country. A generation be- 
fore this* poets in England had led the way in this — as when Gray 
visited the lakes of Cumberland, and Dr. Johnson the Highlands 
and the Western Isles. In his ardour to look upon places famous 
for their natural beauty or their historic associations, or even for 
their having been mentioned in some old Scottish song, Burns 
surpassed both Gray and Johnson, and anticipated the sentiment 
of the present century. Early in May he set out with one of his 
Crochallan club acquaintances, named Ainslie, on a journey to the 
Border. Ainslie was a native of the Merse, his father and family 
living in Dunse. Starting thence with Ainslie, Burns traversed 
the greater part of the vale of Tweed from Coldstream to Peebles, 
recalling, as he went along, snatches of song connected with the 
places he passed. He turned aside to see the valley of the Jed, 
and got as far as Selkirk in the hope of looking upon Yarrow. But 
from doing this he was hindered by a day of unceasing rain, and he 
who was so soon to become the chief singer of Scottish song was 
never allowed to look on that vale which has long been its most 
ideal home. Before finishing his tour, he went as far as Niths- 
dale, and surveyed the farm of Ellisland, with some thought al- 
ready that he might yet become the tenant of it. 

It is noteworthy, but not wonderful, that the scenes visited in 
this tour called forth no poetry from Burns, save here and there 
an allusion that occurred in some of his later songs. When we 
remember with what an uneasy heart Burns left Ayrshire for Edin- 
burgh, that the town life he had there led for the last six months 
had done nothing to lighten— it had probably done semething to 
increase the load of his mental disquietude — that in an illness 
which he had during his tour he confesses that "embittering re- 
morse was scaring his fancy at the gloomy forebodings of death, '* 
and that when his tour was over, soon after his return to Edin- 
burgh, he found the law let loose against him, and what was called 



42 



BURNS. 



a " fugae " warrant issued for his apprehension, owing to some 
occurrence like to that which a year ago had terrified him with 
legal penalties, and all but driven him to Jamaica — when all these 
things are remembered, is it to be wondered that Burns should have 
wandered by the banks of Tweed, in no mood to chaunt beside it 
" a music sweeter than its own ? " 

At the close of his Border tour Burns had, as we have seen, 
visited Nithsdale and looked at the farm of Ellisland. From 
Nithsdale he made his way back to native Ayrshire and his family 
at Mossgiel. I have heard a tradition that his mother met him at 
the door of the small farm-house, with this only salutation, " O 
Robbie ! " Neither Lockhart nor Chambers mentions this, but 
the latter says, his sister, Mrs. Begg, remembered the arrival of 
her brother. He came in unheralded, and was in the midst of 
them before they knew. It was a quiet meeting, for the Mossgiel 
family had the true Scottish reticence or reserve ; but though their 
words were not "mony feck," their feelings were strong. It was, 
indeed, as strange a reverse as ever was made by fortune's fickle 
wheel. " He had left them," to quote the words of Lockhart, 
" comparatively unknown, his tenderest feelings torn and wounded 
by the behaviour of the Armours, and so miserably poor that he 
had been for some weeks obliged to skulk from the sheriff's 
officers to avoid the payment of a paltry debt. He returned, his 
poetical fame established, the whole country ringing with his praise, 
from a capital in which he was known to have formed the wonder 
and delight of the polite and the learned ; if not rich,j r et with more 
money already than any of his kindred had ever hoped to see him 
possess, and with prospects of future patronage and permanent 
elevation in the scale of society, which might have dazzled steadier 
eyes than those of maternal and fraternal affection. The prophet had 
at last honour in his own country, but the haughty spirit that had pre- 
served its balance in Edinburgh was not likely to lose it at Mauch- 
line." The haughty spirit of which Lockhart speaks was reserved 
for others than his own family. To them we hear of nothing but 
simple affection. His youngest sister, Mrs Begg, told Chambers, 
" that her brother went to Glasgow, and thence sent home a present 
to his mother and three sisters, namely, a quantity of mode silk, 
enough to make a bonnet and a cloak to each, and a gown besides 
to his mother and youngest sister." This was the way he took to 
mark their right to share in his prosperity. Mrs. Begg remembers 
going for rather more than a week to Ayr to assist in making up 
the dresses, and when she came back on a Saturdav, her brother 
had returned and requested her P to put on her dress that he 
might see how smart she looked in it." The thing that stirred 
his pride and scorn was the servility with which he was now re- 
ceived by his "plebeian brethren " in the neighborhood, and chief 
among these by the Armours, who had formerly eyed him with 
looks askance. If anything " had been wanting to disgust me com- 
pletely with Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would 
have done it." So he writes, and it was this disgust that prompted 



ISC : RAS> 



43 



him to furnish himself, as we have seen he did, with a pocket copy 
of Milton, to study the character of Satan. This fierce indignation 
was toward the family; towards "bonny Jean ''herself his feeling 
was far other. Having accidentally met her, his old affection 
revived, and they were soon as intimate as of old. 

After a short time spent at Mossgiel wandering about, and 
once, it would seem, penetrating the West Highlands as far as 
Inverary, a journey during which his temper seems to have been 
far from serene, he returned in August to Edinburgh. There he 
encountered, and in time got rid of, the law troubles already al- 
luded to ; and on the 25th of August he set out. on a longer tour 
than any he had yet attempted, to the Northern Highlands. 

The travelling companion whom he chose for this tour was a 
certain Mr. Nicol, whose acquaintance he seems to have lirst 
formed at the Crochallan club, or some other haunt of boisterous 
joviality. After many ups and downs in life Nichol had at last, by 
dint of some scholastic ability, settled as a master of the Edinburgh 
High School. What couid have tempted Burns to select such a 
man for a fellow-traveller ? He was cast in one of nature's roughest 
moulds ; a man of careless habits, coarse manners, enormous 
vanity, of most irascible and violent temper, which ventured itself 
jn cruelties on the poor boys who were the victims of his care. 
Burns compared himself with such a companion to "a man travel- 
ling with a loaded blunderbuss at full cock." Two things only are 
mentioned in his favour, that he had a warm heart, and an un- 
bounded admiration of the poet. But the choice of such a man 
was an unfortunate one, and in the upshot did not a little to spoil 
both the pleasure and the benefit which might have been gathered 
from the tour. 

Their journey lay by Stirling and Crieff to Taymouth and 
Breadalbane, thence to Athole, on through Badenoch and Strath- 
spey to Inverness. The return by the east coast was through the 
counties of Moray and Banff to Aberdeen. After visiting the 
county whence his father had come, and his kindred who were still 
in Kincardineshire, Burns and his companion passed by Perth back 
to Edinburgh, which they reached on the 16th of September. The 
journey occupied only two and twenty days, far too short a time 
to see so much country, besides making several visits, with any 
advantage. During his Border tour Burns had ridden his Ros- 
inante mare, which he had named Jenny Geddes. As his friend, 
the schoolmaster, was no equestrian, Burns was obliged to make 
his northern journey in a post-chaise, not the best way of taking 
in the varied and ever-changing sights and sounds of Highland 
scenery. 

Such a tour as this, if Burns could have entered on it under 
happier auspices, that is, with a heart at ease, a fitting companion, 
and leisure enough to view quietly the scenes through which he 
passed, and to enj y the society of the people whom he met, could 
not have failed, from its own interestingness, and its novel*.*' to 
him, to have enriched his imagination, and to have called J*'<*h 



u 



BURNS. 



some lasting memorials. As it was it cannot be said to have done 
cither. There are, however, a few incidents which are worth 
noting. The first of these took place at Stirling. Burns and 
his companion had ascended the Castle Rock, to look on the blue 
mountain rampart that flanks the Highlands from Ben Lomond 
to Benvoirlich. As they were both strongly attached to the Stuart 
cause, they had seen with indignation, on the slope of the Castle 
hill, the ancient hall, in which the Scottish kings once held their 
Parliaments, lying ruinous and neglected. On returning to their 
inn, Burns, with a diamond he had bought for such purposes, wrote 
on the window-pane of his room some lines expressive of the 
disgust he had felt at that sight, concluding with some offensive 
remarks on the reigning family. The lines, which had no poetic 
merit, got into the newspapers of the day, and caused a good deal 
of comment. On a subsequent visit to Stirling, Burns himself 
broke the pane of the window on which the obnoxious lines were 
written, but they were remembered, it is said, long afterwards to 
his disadvantage. 

Among the pleasantest incidents of the tour was the visit to 
Blair Castle, and his reception by the Duchess of Athole. The 
two days he spent there he declared were among the happiest of 
his life. We have seen how sensitive Burns was to the way he 
was received by the great. Resentful as he was equally of conde- 
scension and of neglect, it must have been no easy matter for 
persons of rank so to adapt their manners as to exactly please him. 
But his hosts at Blair Castle succeeded to admiration in this. They 
were assisted by the presence at the Castle of Mr., afterwards 
Professor, Walker, who had known Burns in Edinburgh, and was 
during that autumn living as a tutor in the Duke's family. At 
dinner Burns was in his most pleasing vein, and delighted his 
hostess by drinking to the health of her group of fair young 
children, as " honest men and bonny lassies "■ — an expression with 
which he happily closes his Petition of Bruar Water. The 
Duchess had her two sisters, Mrs. Graham and Miss Cathcart, 
staying with her on a visit, and all three ladies were delighted with 
the conversation of the poet. These three sisters were daughters 
of a Lord Cathcart, and were remarkable for their beauty. The 
second, Mrs. Graham, has been immortalised as the subject of one 
of Gainsborough's most famous portraits. On her early death her 
husband, Thomas Graham of Balnagown, never again looked on 
that beautiful picture, but left his home for a soldier's life, distin- 
guished himself greatly in the Peninsular War, and was afterwards 
known as Lord Lynedoch. After his death, the picture passed to 
his nearest relatives, who presented it to the National Portrait Gal- 
lery of Scotland, of which it is now the chief ornament. All three 
sisters soon passed away, having died even before the short-lived 
poet. By their beauty and their agreeableness they charmed Burn?, 
and did much to make his visit delightful. They themselves wero 
not less pleased ; for when the poet proposed to leave, after two 
days were over, they pressed him exceedingly to stay, and even 



BURNS. 4S 

sent a messenger to the hotel to persuade the driver ot Burns's 
chaise to pull off one of the horse's shoes, that his departure might 
be delayed. Burns himself would willingly have listened to their 
entreaties, but his travelling mate was inexorable. Likely enough 
Nicol had not been made so mucli of as the poet, and this was enough 
to rouse his irascible temper. For one day he had been persuaded to 
stay by the offer of good trout-fishing, which he greatly relished, but 
now he insisted in being off. Burns was reluctantly forced to 
yield. 

This rapid departure was the most unfortunate because Mr. 
Dundas, who held the keys of Scottish patronage, was expected on 
a visit to Blair, and had he met the poet he might have wiped out 
the reproach often cast on the ministry of the day, that they failed 
in their duty towards Burns. " That eminent statesman," as Lock- 
hart says, " was, though little addicted to literature, a warm lover 
of his own country, and, in general, of whatever redounded to her 
honour; he was, moreover, very especially qualified to appreciate 
Burns as acompanion; and had such an introduction taken place, 
he might not improbably have been induced to bestow that considera- 
tion on the claims of the poet, which, in the absence of any personal 
acquaintance, Burns's works ought to have received at his hands." 
But during that visit Burns met, and made acquaintance of, another 
man of some influence, Mr. Graham of Fintrv, whose friendship 
afterwards, both in the Excise business, and in other matters, stood 
him in good stead. The Duke, as he bade farewell to Burns 
at Blair, advised him to turn aside, and see the Falls of the Bruar, 
about six miles from the Castle, where that stream coming down 
from its mountains plunges over some high precipices, and passes 
through a rocky gorge to join the River Garry. Burns did so, and 
finding the falls entirely bare of wood, wrote some lines entitled 
The Humble Petition of Bruar Water, in which he makes the 
stream entreat the Duke to clothe its naked banks with trees. 
The poet's petition for the stream was not in vain. The then Duke 
of Athole was famous as a planter of trees, and those with which, 
after the Poet's Petition, he surrounded the waterfall remain to 
this day. 

After visiting Culloden Muir, the Fall of Fyers, Kilravock 
Castle, where, but for the impatience of Mr. Nicol. he would 
fain have prolonged his stay, he came on to Fochabers and 
Gordon Castle. This is Burns's entry in his diary : — " Cross Spey 
to Fochabers, fine palace, worthy of the noble, the polite, and 
generous proprietor. The Duke makes me happier than ever great 
man did; noble, princely, yet mild and condescending and affable 
— gay and kind. The Duchess, charming, witty, kind, and sensible. 
God bless them ! " 

Here, too. as at Blair, the ducal hosts seem to have entirely suc- 
ceeded in making Burns feel at ease, and wish to protract his visit. 
But here, too, more emphatically than at Blair, iiis friend spoilt the 
game. This is the account of the incident, as given by Lockhart, 
with a few additions interpolated from Chambers : 



4 6 BURNS. 

" Burns, who had been much noticed by this noble family when 
in Edinburgh, happened to present himself at Gordon Castle just 
at the dinner-hour, and being invited to take a place at the table, 
did so, without for a moment adverting to the circumstance that 
his travelling companion had been left alone at the inn, in the ad- 
jacent village. On remembering this soon after dinner, he begged 
to be allowed to rejoin his friend ; and the Duke of Gordon, who 
now for the first time learned that he was not journeying alone, 
immediately proposed to send an invitation to Mr. Nicol to come 
to the Castle. His Grace sent a messenger to bear it ; but Burns 
insisted on himself accompanying him. They found the haughty 
schoolmaster striding up and down before the inn-door in a high 
state of wrath and indignation at, what he considered, Burns's 
neglect, and no apologies could soften his mood. He had already 
ordered horses, and was venting his anger on the postillion for 
slowness with which he obeyed his commands. The poet, finding 
that he must choose between the ducal circle and his associate, at 
once chose the latter alternative. Nicol and he, in silence and 
mutual displeasure, seated themselves in the post-chaise, and turned 
their backs on Gordon Castle, where the poet had promised himself 
some happy days. This incident may serve to suggest some of the 
annoyances to which persons moving, like our poet, on the debat- 
able land between two different ranks of society must ever be sub- 
jected." " To play the lion under such circumstances must," as 
the knowing Lockhart observes, "be difficult at, the best; but a 
delicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. 
The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, 
and yet — alas for poor human nature! — he certainly was one of 
the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affection- 
ate of all his intimates." It seems that the Duchess of Gordon had 
some hope that her friend, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sid- 
mouth and the future premier would have visited at Gordon Castle 
while Burns was there. Mr. Addington was, Allan Cunningham 
tells us, an enthusiastic admirer of Burns's poetry, and took pleas- 
ure in quoting it to Pitt and Melville. On that occasion he was 
unfortunately notable to accept the invitation of the Duchess, but 
he forwarded to her " these memorable lines — memorable as the 
first indication of that deep love which England now entertains 
for the genius of Burns : " 

" Yes ! pride of Scotia's favoured plains, 'tis thine 
The warmest feelings of the heart to move ; 
To bid it throb with sympathy divine, 
To glow with friendship, or to melt with love 

" What though each morning sees thee rise to toil, 
Though Plenty on thy cot no blessing showers, 
Yet Independence cheers thee with her smile, 
And Fancy strews thy moorland with her flowers 



BURNS. 4 j 

"And dost thou blame the impartial will of Heaven, 
Untaught of life the good and ill to scan? 
To thee the Muse's choicest wreath is given — 
To thee the genuine dignity of man ! 

"Then to the want of worldly gear resigned, 
Be grateful for the wealth of thy exhaustless mind." 

It was well enough for Mr. Addington, and such as he, to 
advise Burns to be content with the want of wordly gear, and to 
refer him for consolation to the dignity of man and the wealth of 
his exhaustless mind. Burns had abundance of such sentiments in 
himself to bring forth, when occasion required. He did not need 
to be replenished with these from the stores of men who held the 
keys of patronage. What he wanted from them was some solid 
benefit, such as they now and then bestowed on their favourites, 
but which unfortunately they withheld from Burns. 

An intelligent boy, who was guide to Burns and Nicol from 
Cullen to Duff House, gave long afterwards his remembrance of 
that day. Among these this occurs. The boy was asked by Nicol 
if he had read Burns's poems, and which of them he liked best. 
The boy replied, "' I was much entertained with The Twa Dogs 
and Death and Dr. Hornbook, but I like best The Cotter's Satur- 
day Nighty although it made me greet when my father had me to 
read it to my mother.' Burns, with a sudden start, looked at my 
face intently, and patting my shoulder, said, ' Well, my callant, I 
don't wonder at your greeting at reading the poem ; it made me 
greet more than once when 1 was writing it at my father's fire- 
side.'". . . 

On the 1 6th of September, 1787, the two travellers returned to 
Edinburgh. This tour produced little poetry directly, and what it 
did produce was not of a high order. In this respect one cannot 
but contrast it with the poetic results of another tour made, partly- 
over the same ground, by another poet, less than twenty years after 
this time. When Wordsworth and his sister made their first visit 
to Scotland in 1803, it called forth some strains of such perfect 
beauty as will live while the English language lasts. Burns's poetic 
fame would hardly be diminished if all that he wrote on his tours 
were obliterated from his works. Perhaps we ought to except 
some allusions in his future songs, and especially that grand song, 
Alacpheisorfs Farewell, which, though composed several months 
after this tour was over, must have drawn its materials from the 
day spent at Duff House, where he was shown the sword of the 
Highland Reiver. - 

But look at the lines composed after his first sight of Breadal- 
bane, which he left in the inn at Kenmore. These Lockhart has 
pronounced among " the best of his purely English heroics." If 
so, we can but say how poor are the best ! What is to be thought 
of such lines as 

Poetic ardours in my bosom swel!, 

Lone wandering by the hermit's mossy cell," etc., etc. 



48 BURNS. 

Nor less stilted, forced, and artificial are the lines in the same 
measure written at the Fall of Fyers. 

The truth is, that Burns' 's forte by no means lay in describing 
scenery alone, and for its own sake. All his really inspired de- 
scriptions of it occur as adjuncts to human incident or feeling, 
slips of landscape let in as a background. Again, as Burns was 
never at his best when called on to write for occasions — no really 
spontaneous poet ever can be — so when taken to see much talked-of 
scenes, and expected to express poetic raptures over them-Burns 
did not answer to the call. 

" He disliked," we are told, "to be tutored in matters of taste, 
and could not endure that one should run shouting before him, 
whenever any fine object came in sight." On one occasion of this 
kind, a lady at the poet's side said, ' ; Burns, have you nothing to 
say of this ? " " Nothing, madam," he replied, glancing at the 
leader of the party, "for an ass is braying over it." Burns is 
not the only person who has suffered from this sort of officious- 
ness. 

Besides this, the tours were not made in the way which most 
conduces to poetic composition. He did not allow himself the 
quiet and the leisure from interruption which are needed. It was 
not with such companions as Ainslie or Nicol by his side that the 
poet's eye discovered new beauty in the sight of a solitary reaper 
in a Highland glen, and his ear caught magical suggestiveness in 
the words, " What ! you are stepping westward," heard by the even 
ing lake. 

Another hindrance to happy poetic description by Burns during 
these journeys was that he had now forsaken his native vernacular, 
and taken to writing in English after the mode of the poets of the 
day. This with him was to unclothe himself of his true strength. 
His correspondent, Dr. Moore, and his Edinburgh critics had no 
doubt counselled him to write in English, and he listened for a 
time too easily to their counsel. He and they little knew what 
they were doing in giving and taking such advice. The truth is, 
when he used his own Scottish dialect he was unapproached, unap- 
proachable ; no poet before or since has evoked out of that instru- 
ment so perfect and so varied melodies. When he wrote in Eng- 
ligh he was seldom more than third-rate ; in fact, he. was but a com- 
mon clever versifier. There is but one purely English poem of 
his which at all approaches the first rank — the lines To Mary in 
Heaven. 

These may probably have been the reasons, but the fact is 
certain that Burns's tours are disappointing in their direct poetic 
fruits. But in another way Burns turned them to good account. 
He had by that time begun to devote himself almost entirely to the 
cultivation of Scottish song. This was greatly encouraged by the 
appearance of Johnson's Musevm. a publication in which an en- 
graver of that name living in Edinburgh had undertaken to make a 
thorough collection of all the best of the old Scottish songs, accom- 
panying them with the best airs, and to add to these any new songs 



BURNS. 



49 



of merit which he could lay hands on. Before Burns left Edinburgh 
for this Border tour, he had begun an acquaintance and correspon- 
dence with Johnson, and had supplied him with four songs of his 
own for the first volume of Tk&Musefam. The second volume was 
now in progress, and his labors for this publication, and for another 
of the same kind to be afterwards mentioned, henceforth engrossed 
Burns's entire productive faculty, and were to be his only serious 
literary work for the rest of his life. He therefore employed the 
Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had any bearing on his 
now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting materials that might pro- 
mote it. With this view, on his way from Tavmouth to Blair, he 
had turned aside to visit the famous fiddler and composer of Scotch 
tunes, Neil Gow, at his house, which is still pointed out, at Inver, 
on the Braan Water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This is 
the entry about him in Burns's diary: — " Neil Gow plays — a short, 
stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his grey hair shed on his 
honest social brow ; an interesting face marking strong sense, 
kind open-heartedness, mixed with unmistrusting simplicity; visit 
his house ; Margaret Gow." It is interesting to think of this meet- 
ing of these two— the one a Lowlander, the other a Highlander ; 
the one the greatest composer of words, the other of tunes, for 
Scottish songs, which their country has produced. 

As he passed through Aberdeen, Burns met Bishop Skinner, a 
Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church ; and when he learnt that 
the Bishop's father, the author of the bongof Tulloch-gorum, and 
The Ewie wV the crookit horn, and other Scottish songs, was still 
alive, an aged Episcopalian clergyman, living in primitive simplicity 
in a but and a ben at Lishart, near Peterhead, and that on his way 
to Aberdeen he had passed by the place without knowing it, Burns 
expressed the greatest regret at having missed seeing the author 
of songs he so greatly admired. Soon after his return to Edin- 
burgh, he received from old Mr. Skinner a rhyming epistle, which 
greatly pleased the poet, and to which he replied — " I regret, and 
while I live shall regret, that when I was north I had not the 
pleasure of paying a younger brother's dutiful respect to the author 
of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw, Tulloch-gontnv 's tny de- 
light" This is strong, perhaps too strong praise. Allan Cunning- 
ham, in his Songs of Scotland, thus freely comments on it : — 
" Tulloch-gorum is a lively clever song, but I would never have 
edited this collection had I thought with Burns that it is the best 
song Scotland ever saw. I may say with the king in my favorite 
ballad— 

I trust I have within my realm, 
Five hundred good as he." 

We also find Burns, on his return to Edinburgh, writing to the 
librarian at Gordon Castle to obtain from him a correct copy of a 
Scotch song composed by the Duke, in the current vernacular 
style, Cauld Kail in Aberdeen. This correct copy he wished to 



5° 



BURNS. 



insert in the forthcoming volume of Johnson's Museum, with the 
name of the author appended. 

At Perth he made inquiries, we are told, "as to the whereabouts 
of the burn-brae on which be the graves of Bessy Bell and Mary 
Gray." Whether he actually visited the spot, near the Almond 
Water, ten miles west of Perth, is left uncertain. The pathetic 
story of these two hapless maidens, and the fine old song founded 
on it, had made it to him a consecrated spot. 

" O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray ! 
They were twa bonny lasses, 
They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae 
And theekit it owre wi' rashes," 

is the beginning of a beautiful song which Allan Ramsay did his 
best to spoil, as he did in many another instance. Sir Walter 
Scott afterwards recovered some of the old verses which Ramsay's 
had superseded, and repeated them to Allan Cunningham, who 
gives them in his Songs of Scotland. Whether Burns knew any 
more of the song than the one old verse given above, with Ramsay's 
appended to it, is more than doubtful. 

As he passed through Perth he secured an introduction to the 
family of Belches of Invermay, that, on crossing the River Earn on 
his southward journey, he might be enabled to see the little valley, 
running down from the Ochils to the Earn, which has been conse- 
crated by the old and well known song, The Birks of Invermay. 

It thus appears that the old songs of Scotland, their localities, 
their authors, and the incidents whence they arose, were now up- 
permost in the thoughts of Burns, whatever part of his country he 
visited. This was as intense and as genuinely poetical an interest, 
though a more limited one, than that with which Walter Scott's eye 
afterwards ranged over the same scenes. The time was not yet 
full come for that wide and varied sympathy, with which Scott 
surveyed the whole past of his country's history, nor was Burns's 
nature or training such as to give him that catholicity of feeling 
which was required to sympathise, as Scott did, with all ranks and 
all ages. Neither could he have so seized on the redeeming vir- 
tues of rude and half-barbarous times, and invested them with that 
halo of romance which Scott has thrown over them. This roman- 
tic and chivalrous colouring was an element altogether alien to 
Burns's character. But it may well be, that these very limitations 
intensified the depth and vividness of sympathy with which Burns 
conceived the human situations portrayed in his best songs. 

There was one more brief tour of ten days during October, 
1787, which Burns made in the company of Dr. Adair. They 
pass first to Stirling, where Burns broke the obnoxious pane ; then 
paid a second visit to Harvieston, near Dollar — for Burns had 
paid a flying visit of one dav there, at the end of August, before 
passing northward to the Highlands — where Burns introduced his 
friend, and seems to have flirted with some Ayrshire young ladies, 



BUKNS. 51 

relations of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Thence they passed on a 
visit to Mr. Ramsay at Ochtertyre, on the Teith, a few miles west 
from Stirling. They then visited Sir William Murray at Ochter- 
tyre, in Sfrathearn, where Burns wrote his Lines on scaring some 
waterfowl in Loch Turit, and a pretty pastoral song on a young 
beauty he met there, Miss Murray of Lintrose. From Strathearn 
he next seems to have returned by Clackmannan, there to visit the 
old lady who lived in the Tower, of whom he had heard from Mr. 
Ramsay. In this short journey the most memorable thing was 
the visit to Mr. Ramsay at his' picturesque old country seat, sit- 
uate on the River Teith, and commanding, down the vista of its 
old lime-tree avenue, so romantic a view of Stirling Castle rock. 
There Burns made the acquaintance of Mr. Ramsay, the laird, and 
was charmed with the conversation of that "last of the Scottish 
line of Latinists, which began with Buchanan and ended with 
Gregory" — an antiquary, moreover, whose manners and home 
Loc'khart thinks that Sir Walter may have had in his recollection 
when he drew the character of Monk'barns. Years afterwards, in a 
letter addressed to Dr. Currie, Ramsay thus wrote of Burns :— " I 
have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them 
poets, but I never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness 
as from him, the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire. I 
never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company two 
days tete-a-tete. In a mixed company I should have made little 
of him ; for, to use the gamester's phrase, be did not know when 
to play off, and when to play on. . . . When I asked whether the 
Edinburgh literati had mended his poems by their criticisms, ' Sir,' 
said he, ' these gentlemen remind me of some spinsters in my own 
country, who spin their thread so fine, that it is neither fit for weft 
nor woof.' " 

There are other incidents recorded of that time. Among these 
was a visit to Mrs. Bruce, an old Scottish dame of ninety, who 
lived in the ancient Tower of Clackmannan, upholding her dignity 
as the lineal descendant and representative of the family of King 
Robert Bruce, and cherishing the strongest attachment to the exiled 
Stuarts. Both of these sentiments found a ready response from 
Burns. The one was exemplified by the old lady conferring knight- 
hood on him and his companion with the actual sword of King 
Robert, which she had in her possession, remarking, as she did it, 
that she had a better right to confer the title than some folk. An- 
other sentiment she charmed the poet by expressing in the toast 
she gave after dinner, " Hooi Uncos" that is, Away Strangers, a 
word used by shepherds when they bid their collies drive away 
strange sheep. Who the strangers were in this case may be 
guessed from her known Jacobite sentiments. 

On his way from Clackmannan to Edinburgh he turned aside 
to see Loch Leven and its island castle, which had been the prison 
of the hapless Mary Stuart ; and thence passing to the Norman 
Abbey Church of Dunfermline, with deep emotion he looked on the 
grave of Robert Bruce. At that time the choir of the old church, 



52 



BURNS. 



which had contained the grave, had been long demolished, and the 
new structure which now covers it had not yet been thought of. 
The sacred spot was only marked by two broad flagstones, on 
which Burns knelt and kissed them, reproaching the while the bar- 
barity that had so dishonoured the resting-place of Scotland's hero 
king. Then, with that sudden change of mood so characteristic of 
him, he passed within the ancient church, and mounting the pulpit, 
addressed to his companion, who had, at his desire, mounted the 
cutty stool, or seat of repentance, a parody of the rebuke which he 
himself had undergone some time before at Mauchline. 



BURNS- S3 



CHAPTER IV. 

SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 

These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns returned 
to Edinburgh, and spent there the next five months, from the latter 
part of October, 1787, till the end of March, 1788, in a way which 
to any man, much more to such an one as he, could give small satis- 
faction. The ostensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to 
obtain a settlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, be- 
cause, till this was effected, he had no money with which to enter 
on the contemplated farm, or on any other regular way of life. 
Probably in thus wasting his time, Burns may have been influenced 
more than he himself was aware, by a secret hope that something 
might yet be done for him — that all the smiles lavished on him by 
the great and powerful could not possibly mean nothing, and that 
he should be left to drudge on in poverty and obscurity as before. 

During this winter Burns changed his quarters from Richmond's 
lodging in High Street, where he had lived during the former win- 
ter, to a house then marked 2, now 30. St. James's Square in the 
New Town. There he lived with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague 
of his friend Nicol in the High school, and there he continued to 
reside till he left Edinburgh. More than once he paid brief visits 
to Nithsdale, and examined again and yet again the farm on the 
Dalswinton property, on which he had long had his eye. This 
was his only piece of serious business during those months. The 
rest of his time was spent more or less in the society of his jovial 
companions. We hear no more during this second winter of his 
meetings with literary professors, able advocates and judges, or 
fashionable ladies. His associates seem to have been rather con- 
fined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seem 
also to have amused himself with flirtations with several young 
heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous 
summer. The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Mar- 
garet Chalmers and Miss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each 
other, and relatives of his Mauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. 
These he had met during the two visits which he paid to Harvies- 
ton, on the River Devon, where they were living for a time. On 
his return to Edinburgh he continued to correspond with them 
both, and to address songs of affection, if not of love, now to one 



54 



BURNS. 



now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he addressed the song 

beginning — 

" How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;" 

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines — 

" Where, braving angry winter's storms, 
The lofty Ochils rise ; " 

And another beginning thus — 

" My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form." 

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's affection, it is 
not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote 
some of his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan 
Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamil- 
ton. The latest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on 
Miss Chalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, 
told Thomas Campbell, the poet, that Burns had made a proposal 
of marriage co fter. However this may be, it is certain that while 
both admitted him to friendship, neither encouraged his advances. 
They were better " advised than to do so." Probably they knew 
too much of his past history and his character to think of him as a 
husband. Both were soon after this time married to men more 
likely to make them happy than the erratic poet. When they turned 
a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote : " My rhetoric seems to have 
lost all its effect on the lovely half of mankind ; I have seen the 
day — but thatis a tale of other years. In my conscience, I believe 
that my heart has been so often on fire that it has been vitrified ! " 
Well perhaps for him if it had been so, such small power had lie to 
guide it. Just about the time when he found himself rejected, 
notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses, by the two young 
ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident through the upset- 
ting of a hackney-coach by a drunken driver. The fall left him with 
a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the 7th of 
December till the middle of February (1788). 

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the 
letters which he then wrote under the influence of that hypochon- 
dria and despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of dis- 
content with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent 
to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, 
the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, 
agonising sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, 

but I'm no like to die I fear I am something like undone; 

but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking 
Resolution : accompany me through this to me miserable worlrl ! I 
have a hundred times wished that one could resign life, as an officer 
resigns a commission ; for I would not take in any poor wretch by 
selling out. Lately I was a sixpennv private, and, God knows, a 
miserable soldier enough : now I march to the campaign, a starving 
cadet — a little more conspicuously wretched." 



BURNS. S5 

But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his 
consequent despondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts 
by a new excitement. Just at the time when he met witli his acci- 
dent, he had made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, 
and acquaintance all at once became a violent attachment on both 
sides. This lady had been deserted by her husband, who had <r>ne 
to the West Indies, leaving her in poverty and obscurity to brino- 
up two young boys as best she might. We are told that she was 
" of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of lively and easy man- 
ners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit, and not too high 
a degree of refinement or delicacy— exactly the kind of woman \o 
fascinate Burns." Fascinated he certainly was. On tire 30th De- 
cember he writes : " Almighty love still reigns and revels in my 
bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a 
young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murder- 
ously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or 
the poisoned arrow of the savage African." For several months 
his visits to her house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The 
sentimental correspondence which they began, in which Burns ad- 
dresses her as Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylyapder, 
has been published separately, and become notorious. Though this 
correspondence may contain, as Lockhart says, "passages of deep 
and noble feeling, which no one but Burns could have penned," it 
cannot be denied that it contains many more of such fustian, such 
extravagant bombast, as Burns or any man beyond twenty might 
well have been ashamed to write. One could wish that for the poet's 
sake this correspondence had never been preserved. It is so hu- 
miliating to read this torrent of falsetto sentiment now, and to think 
that a man gifted like Burns should have poured it forth. How far 
his feelings towards Clarinda were sincere, or how far they were 
wrought up to amuse his vacancy by playing at love-making, it is' 
hard to say. Blended with a profusion of forced compliments and 
unreal raptures, there are expressions in Burns's letters which one 
cannot but believe that he meant in earnest, at the moment when 
he wrote them. Clarinda, it would seem, must have regarded 
Burns as a man wholly disengaged, and have looked forward to the 
possible removal of Mr. M'Lehose, and with him of the obstacle to 
a union with Burns. How far he may have really shared the same 
hopes it is impossible to say. We only know that he used again 
and again language of deepest, devotion, vowing to "love Clarinda 
to death, through death, and for ever." 

While this correspondence between Sylvander and Clarinda was 
in its highest flight of rapture, Burns received, in January or Feb- 
ruary, 1788, news from Mauchline which greatly agitated him. His 
renewed intercourse with Jean Armour had resulted in consequences 
which again stirred her father's indignation ; this time so power- 
fully, that he turned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a 
shelter for her under the roof of a friend ; but for a time he does 
not seem to have thought of doing more than this. Whether he 
regarded the original private marriage as entirely dissolved, and 



5 6 BURNS. 

looked on himself as an unmarried man does not quite appear. Any- 
how, he and Clarind?, who knew all that had passed with regard to 
Jean Armour, seem to have then thought that enough had been 
done for the seemingly discarded Mauchline damsel, and to have 
carried on their correspondence as rapturously as ever for fully 
another six weeks, until the 21st of March (1788). On that day 
Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter, pledging himself to ever- 
lasting love, and following it by a copy of verses beginning — 

" Fair empress of the poet's soul," 

presenting her at the same time with a pair of wine-glasses as a 
parting gift. 

On the 24th of March, he turned his back on Edinburgh, and 
never returned to it for more than a day's visit. 

Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of 
business, all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had 
secured for himself an appointment in the Excise through the kind- 
ness of " Lang Sandy Wood," the surgeon who attended him when 
laid up with a bruised limb, and who had interceded with Mr. Gra- 
ham of Fintray, the chief of the Excise Board, on Burns's behalf. 
When he received his appointment, he wrote to Miss Chalmers, 
" I have chosen this, my dear friend, after mature deliberation. 
The question is not at*what door of fortune's palace shall we enter 
in, but what doors does she open for us. I was not likely to get 
anything to do. I got this without hanging-on, or mortifying soli- 
citation ; it is immediate bread, and though poor in comparison of 
the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison 
of all my preceding life." 

Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswin- 
ton, to lease his farm of Ellisland, on which he had long set his 
heart, and to which he had paid several visits in order to inspect it. 

Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement with Creech 
regarding the Second Edition of his Poems. Before this was 
effected. Burns had more than once lost his temper, and let Creech 
know his mind. Various accounts have been given of the profits 
that now accrued to Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot 
be far wrong in taking the estimate at which Dr. Chambers arrived, 
for on such a matter he could speak with authority. He sets down 
the poet's profits at as nearly as possible 500/. Of this sum Burns 
gave 180/. to his brother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trou- 
ble. " I give myself no airs on this," he writes, " for it was mere 
selfishness on my part : I was conscious that the wrong scale of 
the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throw- 
ing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my 
favour, might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning." 
This money was understood by the family to be the provision due 
from Robert on behalf of his mother, the support of whom he was, 
now that he was setting up for himself, about to throw on his 
younger brother. Chambers seems to reckon that as another 120/. 



BURNS. 



57 



must have been spent by Burns on his tours, his accident, and his 
sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could not have more 
than 200/. over, with which to set up at Ellisland. We see in what 
terms Burns had written to Garinda on the 21st of March. On 
his leaving Edinburgh and returning to Ayrshire, he married Jean 
Armour, and forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. 
This was in April, though it was not till August that he and Jean 
appeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally recognised as 
man and wife by the Church. 

Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was carry- 
ing out a legal, as well as a moral, obligation, we know not. The 
interpreters of the law now assert that the original marriage in 1786 
had never been dissolved, and that the destruction of the promis- 
sory lines, and the temporary disownment of him by Jean and her 
family, could not in any way invalidate it. Indeed, after all that 
had happened, for Burns to have deserted Jean, and married an- 
other, even if he legally could have done so, would have been the 
basest infidelity. Amid all his other errors and inconsistencies — 
and no doubt there were enough of these — we cannot but be glad 
for the sake of his good name that he now acted the part of an 
honest man, and did what he could to repair the much suffering 
and shame he had brought on his frail but faithful Jean. 
* As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry Jean 
Armour, and not another, this is the account he himself gives when 
writing to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted correspondents, to 
whom he spoke out his real heart in a simpler, more natural way, 
than was usual with him in letter-writing: 

" You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me 
more friends ; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious 
peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confi- 
dence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the 
number. I found a once much-loved, and still much-loved, female, 
literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements ; but 
I enabled her to purchase a shelter ; — there is no sporting with a 
fellow-creature's happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature 
and sweetness of disposition ; a warm heart, gratefully devoted 
with all its powers to love me ; vigorous health and sprightly cheer- 
fulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly 
handsome figure ; these, I think, in a woman may make a good 
wife, though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures 
of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter 
assembly than a penny pay wedding." 

To Miss Chalmers he says : 

" I have married my Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow- 
creature's happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst 
not trifle with so important a deposit, nor have I any cause to re- 
pent it. If I have not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and 
fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disquieted with the mul- 
tiform curse of boarding-school affectation ; and I have got the 
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, 



58 



BURNS. 



and the kindest heart in the country. ... A certain late publica- 
tion of Scots poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the 
balads in the country, as she has the finest wood-note wild 1 ever 
heard." 

There have been many comments on this turning point in 
Burns 's life. Some have given him high praise for it, as though he 
had done a heroic thing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it 
might have been open to him to form a much higher connexion. 
But all such praise seems entirely thrown away. It was not, as it 
appears, open to him to form any other marriage legally ; certainly 
it was not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is en- 
tirely true, that, " had he hesitated to make her his wife, whom he 
loved, and who was the mother of his children, he must have sunk 
into the callousness of a ruffian." Lockhart need hardly have 
added " or into that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet." 

But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean — 
which they did not — would it have been well for Burns, if he had 
sought, as one of his biographers regrets that he had not done, a 
wife among ladies of higher rank and more refined manners ? That 
he could appreciate what these things imply, is evident from his own 
confession in looking back on his introduction to what is called so- 
ciety : " A refined and accomplished woman was a being altogether 
new to me, and of which I had formed a very inadequate idea." Ife; 
requires but little knowledge of the world and its ways to see the 
folly of all such regrets. Great disparity of condition in marriage 
seldom answers. And in the case of a wayward, moody man, with 
the pride, the poverty, and the irregularities of Burns, and the 
drudging toil which must needs await his wife, it is easy to see 
what misery such marriage would have stored up for both. As it 
was, the marriage he made was, to put it at the lowest, one of the 
most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved to be all, and indeed 
more than all, he anticipates in the letters above given. During 
the eight years of their married life, according to all testimony, she 
did her part as a wife and mother with the most patient and placid 
fidelity, and bore the trials which her husband's irregular habits 
entailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after his 
death, during her long widowhood, she revered his memory, and 
did her utmost to maintain the honour of his name. 

With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife, Burns had bid farewell 
to Edinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may have at any time 
kindled within him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer 
to that in which he was born. With what feelings did he pass 
from this brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him 
back to the dreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped 
to have escaped ? There can be little doubt that his feelings were 
those of bitter disappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked 
contrast between the reception he had met with during his first 
and second winters in Edinburgh. As Allan Cunningham says, 
" On his first appearance the doors of the nobility opened spontan- 
eously, 'on -golden hinges turning,' and he ate spiced meats and 



BURNS. 



59 



drank rare wines, interchanging nods and smiles with high dukes 
and mighty earls. A colder reception awaited his second coming. 
The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardy courtesy ; he 
was received with a cold and measured stateliness, was seldom 
requested to stop, seldomer to repeat his visit ; and one of his 
companions used to relate with what indignant feeling the poet re- 
counted his fruitless calls and his uncordial receptions in the good 
town of Edinburgh. . . . He went to Edinburgh strong in the 
belief that genius such as his would raise him in society ; he 
returned not without a sourness of spirit and a bitterness of feeling." 

When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into man's, 
but into woman's sympathetic ear that he poured his complaint. It 
is thus he writes, some time after settling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dun- 
lop, showing how fresh was still the wound within. " When I skulk 
into a corner lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead 
should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, ' What 
merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous 
state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with 
the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I 
am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride ? 
. . . Often as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp 
of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement 
on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own 
conceit of his own consequence in the world, could have pushed 
out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his 
horns, or as we draw out a prospect glass.' " 

This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of 
prose and verse, but which probably never possessed him more 
bitterly than when he retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in 
such circumstances may have felt thoughts of this kind pass over 
them for a moment. But they have felt ashamed of them as they 
rose, and have at once put them by. Burns no doubt had a severer 
trial in this way than most, but he never could overcome it, never 
ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions which is so strongly 
fixed in the system in which we find ourselves. 

It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the 
changed countenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and 
it is easy to be sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning 
it : but were they really so much to blame ? There are many cases 
under the present order of things, in which we are constrained to 
say. " It must needs be that offences come." Taking men and 
things as they are, could it well have been otherwise ? 

First, the novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his second 
winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty 
always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the 
quiet, decorous men of Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways 
and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely 
to increase their desire for intimacy with him. It was, it seems, 
notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book 
already alluded to, in which he was supposed to sketch with un- 



60 BURNS. 

sparing hand, " stern likenesses " of his friends and benefactors. 
So little of a secret did he make of this, that we are told he some- 
times allowed a visitor to have a look at the figures which he had 
sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledge that such a book 
existed was not likely to make Blair and his friends more desirous 
of his society. 

Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other such 
haunts, the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with 
whom he consorted, these were well known. And it was not possi- 
ble that either the ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the 
Crochallan Club could be welcomed in quieter and more polished 
circles. Men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have 
been quite in place there. 

Again — what is much to the honour of Burns — he never, in the 
highest access of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friend- 
ship towards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been as- 
sociated in his days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, 
and peasants. The thought of them, their sentiments, their preju- 
dices and habits, if it had been possible, their very persons, he 
would have taken with him, without disguise or apology, into the 
highest circles of rank or of literature. But this might not be. It 
was impossible that Burns could take Mauchline with its belles, its 
Poosie-Nansies and its Souter Johnnies, bodily into the library of 
Dr. Blair or the drawing-room of Gordon Castle. 

A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice ; but he 
cannot live at once in two different and widely sundered orders of 
society. To no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as 
that of Burns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the 
barriers with which custom and the world have hedged us in, and 
to weld the extremes of society into one. To the speculative as 
well as to the practically humane man, the great inequality in hu- 
man conditions presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little 
less worldly pride, and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, 
would probably have helped Burns to solve it better than he did. 
But besides the social grievance, which though impalpable is very 
real, Burns had another more material and tangible. The great 
whom he had met in Edinburgh, whose castles he had visited in 
the country, might have done something to raise him at once above 
poverty and toil, and they did little or nothing. They had, indeed, 
subscribed liberally for his Second Edition, and they had got him 
a gauger's post, with fifty or sixty pounds a year — that was all. 
What more could they, ought they to have done ? To have ob- 
tained him an office in some one of the higher professions was not 
to be thought of, for a man cannot easily, at the age of eight-and- 
twenty, change his whole line and adapt himself to an entirely new 
employment. The one thing they might have combined to do, was 
to have compelled Dundas, or some other of the men then in power, 
to grant Burns a pension from the public purse. That was the day 
of pensions, and hundreds with no claim to compare with Burns's 
were then on the pension list : 300/. a year would have sufficed to 



BURNS. 6x 

place him in comfort and independence ; and could public money 
have been better spent ? But though the most rigid economist 
might not have objected, would Burns have accepted such a bene- 
faction, had it been offered ? And if he had accepted it, would he 
not have chafed under the obligation, more even than he did in the 
absence of it ? Such questions as these cannot but arise, as often 
as we think over the fate of Burns, and ask ourselves if nothing 
could have been done to avert it. Though natural, they are vain. 
Things hold on their own course to their inevitable issues, and 
Burns left Edinburgh, and set his face first towards Ayrshire, 
then to Nithsdale, a saddened and embittered man. 



C ) BURNS. 



CHAPTER V. 

LIFE OF ELLISLAND. 

u Mr. Burns, you have made a poet's not a farmer's choice." 
Such was the remark of Allan Cunningham's father, land-steward to 
the laird of Dalswinton, when the poet turned from the low-lying 
and fertile farm of Foregirth, which Cunningham had recommended 
to him, and selected forhis future home the farm of Ellisland. He 
was taken by the beautiful situation and fine romantic outlook of 
the poorest of several farms on the Dalswinton estate which were 
in his option. Ellisland lies on the western bank of the River 
Nith, about six miles above Dumfries. Looking from Ellisland 
eastward across the river, " a pure stream running there over the 
purest gravel," you see the rich holms and noble woods of Dalswin- 
ton. Dalswinton is an ancient historic place, which has even 
within recorded memory more than once changed its mansion-house 
and its proprietor. To the west the eye falls on the hills of Duns- 
core, and looking northward up the Nith, the view is bounded by 
the heights that shut in the river towards Drumlanrig, and by the 
high conical hill of Corsincon, at the base of which the infant stream 
slips from the shire of Ayr into that of Dumfries. The farmstead- 
ing of Ellisland stands but a few yards to the west of the Nith. 
Immediately underneath there is a red scaur of considerable height 
overhanging the stream, and the rest of the bank is covered with 
broom, through which winds a greensward path, whither Burns used 
to retire to meditate his songs. The farm extends to upwards of a 
hundred acres, part holm, part croft-land, of which the former yield- 
id good wheat, the latter oats and potatoes. The lease was for 
nineteen years, and the rent fifty pounds for the first three years ; 
seventy for the rest of the tack. The laird of Dalswinton, while 
Burns leased Ellisland, was Mr. Patrick Millar, not an ordinary 
laird, but one well known in his day for his scientific discoveries. 
There was no proper farm-house or offices on the farm — it was part 
of the bargain that Burns should build these for himself. The 
want of a house made it impossible for him to settle at once on his 
farm. His bargain for it had been concluded early in March 
(1788) ; but it was not till the 13th of June that he went to reside 
at Ellisland. In the interval between these two dates he went to 



BPXJVS. 65 

Ayrshire, and completed privately, as we have seen, the marriage, 
the long postponement of which had caused him so much disquiet. 
With however great disappointment and chagrin he may have left 
Edinburgh, the sense that he had now done the thing that was right, 
and had the prospect of a settled life before him, gave him for a time 
a peace and even gladness of heart, to which he had for long been 
a stranger. We can, therefore, well believe what he tells us, that, 
when he had left Edinburgh, he journeyed towards Mauchline with 
as much gaiety of heart "as a May-frog, leaping across the newly- 
harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the refreshed earth after 
the long-expected shower." Of what may be called the poet's 
marriage settlement, we have the following details from Allan 
Cunningham : 

" His marriage reconciled the poet to his wife's kindred : there 
was no wedding portion. Armour was a respectable man, but not 
opulent. He gave his daughter some small store of plenishing; 
and, exerting his skill as a mason, wrought his already eminent 
son-in-law a handsome punch-bowl in Inverary marble, which Burns 
lived to fill often, to the great pleasure both of himself and his 
friends. . . . Mrs. Dunlop bethought herself of Ellisland, and gave 
a beautiful heifer ; another friend contributed a plough. The 
voung couple, from love to their native county, ordered their 
furniture from a wright in Mauchline : the farm-servants, male and 
female, were hired in Ayrshire, a matter of questionable prudence, 
for the mode of cultivation is different from that of the west, and 
the cold, humid bottom of Mossgiel bears no resemblance to the 
warm and stony loam of Ellisland." 

When on the 13th June he went to live on his farm, he had, as 
there was no proper dwelling-house on it, to leave Jean and her one 
surviving child behind him at Mauchline, and himself to seek 
shelter in a mere hovel on the skirts of the farm. " I remember 
the house well," says Cunningham, " the floor of clay, the rafters 
japanned with soot, the smoke from a hearth-fire streamed thickly 
out at door and window, while the sunshine which struggled in at 
those apertures produced a sort of twilight." Burns thus writes to 
Mrs. Dunlop, " A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from 
every object I love or by whom I am beloved ; nor any acquaint- 
ance older than yesterday ; except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I 
ride on, while uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my 
awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience." It takes a more 
even, better-ordered spirit than Burns's to stand such solitude. 
His heart, during those first weeks at Ellisland, entirely sank within 
him, and he saw all men and life coloured by his own despondency. 
This is the entry in his commonplace book on the first Sunday he 
spent alone at Ellisland : — " I am such a coward in life, so tired of 
the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, 
' gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace.' But a wife 
and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till some sudden 
squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the listless return of years 
its own craziness reduce it to wreck." 



6 4 BURNS. 

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not only dis- 
contented with his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he 
found himself. "I am here," he writes, "on my farm; but for all 
the pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am at 
the very elbow of existence. The only things to be found in per- 
fection in this country are stupidity and canting. ... As for the 
Muses, they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as a poet." 

When he was not in Ayrshire in bodily presence, he was there 
in spirit. It was at such a time that, looking up to the hills that 
divide Nithsdale from Ayrshire, he breathed to his wife that most 
natural and beautiful of all his love-lyrics — 

" Of a' the airts the wind can blaw 
I dearly like the west, 
For there the bonnie lassie lives, 
The lassie I lo'e best." 

Hi* disparagement of Nithsdale people, Allan Cunningham, 
himself a Dumfriesshire man, naturally resents, and accounts for 
it by supposing that the sooty hovel had infected his whole mental 
atmosphere. " The Maxwells, the Kirkpatricks, and Dalzells," 
exclaims honest Allan, "were fit companions for any man in Scot- 
land, and they were almost his neighbours; Riddell of Friars 
Carse, an accomplished antiquarian, lived almost next door ; and 
Jean Lindsay and her husband, Patrick Millar, the laird of Dal- 
swinton, were no ordinary people. The former, beautiful, accom- 
plished, a writer of easy and graceful verses, with a natural dignity 
of manners which became her station ; the latter an improver and 
inventor, the first who applied steam to the purposes of naviga- 
tion." But Burns's hasty judgments of men and things, the re- 
sult of momentary feeling, are not to be too literally construed. 

He soon found that there was enough of sociality among all 
ranks of Dumfriesshire people, from the laird to the cotter, indeed, 
more than was good for himself. Yet, however much he may have 
complained, when writing letters to his correspondents of an even- 
ing, he was too manly to go moping about all day long when there 
was work to be done. He was, moreover, nerved to the task by 
the thought that he was preparing the home that was to shelter his 
wife and children. On the laying of the foundation stone of his 
future house, he took off his hat and asked a blessing on it. " Did 
he ever put his own hand to the work ? " was asked of one of the 
men engaged in it. " Ay, that he did, mony a time," was the an- 
swer ; " if he saw us like to be beat wi' a big stane, he would cry, 
'Bide a wee,' and come rinning. We soon found out when he put 
to his hand, he beat a' I ever met for. a dour lift." 

During his first harvest, though the weather was unfavourable, 
and the crop a poor one, we find Burns speaking in his letters of 
being industriously employed, and binding every day after the 
reapers. But Allan Cunningham's father, who had every oppor- 
tunity of observing, used to allege that Burns seemed to him like a 



BURNS. 65 

restless and unsettled man. " He was ever on the move, on foot 
or on horseback. In the course of a single day he might be seen 
holding the plough, angling in the river, sauntering, with his hands 
behind his back, on the banks, looking at the running water, of 
which he was very fond, walking round his buildings or over his 
fields ; and if you lost sight of him for an hour, perhaps you might 
see him returning from Friars Carse, or spurring his horse through 
the hills to spend an evening in some distant place with such friends 
as chance threw in his way." Before his new house was ready, he 
had many a long ride to and fro through the Cumnock hills to 
Mauchline, to visit Jean, and to return. It was not till the first 
week of December, 1788, that his lonely bachelor life came to an 
end, and that he was able to bring his wife and household to 
Nithsdale. Even then the house at Ellisland was not ready for his 
reception, and he and his family had to put up for a time in a neigh- 
bouring farm-house called the Isle. They brought with them two 
farmJads from Ayrshire, and a servant lass called Elizabeth Smith, 
who was alive in 1851, and gave Chambers many details of the 
poet's way of life at Ellisland. Among these she told him that her 
father was so concerned about her moral welfare that, before 
allowing her to go, he made Burns promise to keep a strict watch 
over her behaviour, and to exercise her duly in the Shorter Cate- 
chism; and that both of these promises he faithfully fulfilled. 

The advent of his wife and his child in the dark days of the 
year kept dulness aloof, and made him meet the coming of the new 
year (1789) with more cheerful hopes and calmer spirits than he 
had known for long. Alas, that these were doomed to be so short- 
lived ! 

On New-Year's morning, 1789, his brother Gilbert thus affec- 
tionately writes to the poet : "Dear Brother, — I have just finished 
my New-Year's Day breakfast in the usual form, which naturally 
makes me call to mind the days of former years, and the society in 
which we used to begin them ; and when I look at our family vicis- 
situdes, ' through the dark postern of time long elapsed,' I cannot 
help remarking to you, my dear brother, how good the God of 
seasons is to us, and that, however some clouds may seem to lower 
over the portion of time before us, we have great reason to hope that 
all will turn out well." On the same New-Year's Day Burns ad- 
dressed to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, which, though it has been often 
quoted, is too pleasing to be omitted here. " I own myself so 
little a Presbyterian, that I approve set times and seasons of more 
than ordinary acts of devotion for breaking in on that habituated 
routine of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence 
to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a 
state very little superior to mere machinery. This day — the first 
Sunday of May — a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the 
beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end, 
of autumn — these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of 
holiday. . . . We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the sub- 
stance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seem- 



66 BURNS. 

ing caprices in them, that we should be particularly pleased with 
this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast 
makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers 
in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox- 
glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary haw- 
thorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never 
hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or 
the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal 
morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm 
of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this 
be owing ? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the yEolian 
harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident ? Or 
do these workings argue something within us above the trodden 
clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and im- 
portant realities — a God that made all things — man's immaterial 
and immortal nature — and a world of weal or woe beyond death 
and the grave ! " 

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an ornithologist 
remarked that Burns had made a mistake in a fact of natural his- 
tory. It is not the 'grav plover,' but the golden, whose music is 
heard on the moors in autumn. The gray plover, our accurate 
observer remarks, is a winter shore bird, found only at that season 
and in that habitat, in this country. 

It was not till about the middle of 17S9 that the farmhouse of 
Ellisland was finished, and that he and his family, leaving the Isle, 
went to live in it. When all was ready, Burns bade his servant, 
Betty Smith, take a bowl of salt, and place the Family Bible on 
the top of it, and, bearing these, walk first into the new house and 
possess it. He himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty 
and the Bible and the salt, and so they entered their new abode. 
Burns delighted to keep up old-world freits or usages like this. 
It was either on this occasion, or on his bringing Mrs. Burns to 
the Isle, that he held a house-heating mentioned by Allan Cun- 
ningham, to which all the neighbourhood gathered, and drank, 
" Luck to the roof-tree of the house of Burns ! " The farmers 
Vnd the well-to-do people welcomed him gladly, and were proud 
\hat such a man had come to be a dweller in their vale. Yet the 
ruder country lads and the lower peasantry, we are told, looked on 
ftim not without dread, "lest he should pickle and preserve them 
in sarcastic song." " Once at a penny wedding, when one or two 
ivild young lads quarrelled, and were about to fight, Burns rose 

up and said. ' Sit down and , or else I'll hang you up like 

potato-bogles in sang to-morrow.' They ceased, and sat down as 
if their noses had been bleeding." 

The house which had cost Burns so much toil in building, and 
which he did not enter till about the middle of the year 1789, was 
a humble enough abode. Onlv a large kitchen, in which the whole 
family, master and servants, took their meals together, a room to 
hold two beds, a closet to hold one, and a garret, coom-ceiled, for 
the female servants, this made the whole dwelling-house. " One 



BUKNS. 6 y 

of the windows looked southward down the holms ; another opened 
on the river ; and the house stood so near the lofty bank, thai its 
afternoon shadow fell across the stream, „n the opposite; fields. 
The garden or kail-yard was a little way from the house. A pretty 
footpath led southward along the river side, another ran northward, 
affording fine views of the Nith, the woods of Friars Carse, and 
the grounds of Dalswinton. Half-way down the steep declivity, a 
fine clear cool spring supplied water to the household." Such was 
the first home which Burns found for himself and his wife, and 
the best they were ever destined to find. The months spent in 
the Isle, and the few that followed the settlement at Ellisland, 
were among the happiest of his life. Besides trying his best to set 
himself to farm-industry, he was otherwise bent on well-doing. 
He had, soon after his arrival in Ellisland, started a parish library, 
both for his own use and to spread a love of literature among his 
neighbours, the portioners and peasants of Dunscore. When he 
first took up house at Ellisland, he used every evening when he 
was at home, to gather his household for family worship, and, after 
the old Scottish custom, himself to offer up prayer in his own 
words. He was regular, if not constant, in his attendance at the 
parish church of Dunscore, in which a worthy minister, Mr. Kirk- 
patrick, officiated, whom he respected for his character, though he 
sometimes demurred to what seemed to him the too great stern- 
ness of his doctrine. 

Burns and his wife had not been long settled in their newly- 
bulit farm-house, when prudence induced him to ask that he might 
be appointed Excise officer in the district in which he lived. This 
request Mr. Graham of Fintray, who had placed his name on the 
Excise list before he left Edinburgh, at once granted. The reasons 
that impelled Burns to this step were the increase of his family by 
the birth of a son in August, 1789, and the prospect that his 
second year's harvest would be a failure like the first. He often 
repeats that it was solely to make provision for his increasing fam- 
ily that he submitted to the degradation of — 

" Searching auld wives' barrels — 

Och, hon ! the day ! 
That clarty barm should stain my laurels, 

But — what '11 ye say ? 
These movin things, ca'd wives and weans, 
Wad move the very hearts o' stanes." 

That he felt keenly the slur that attached to the name of 
gauger is certain, but it is honourable to him that he resolved 
bravely to endure it for the sake of his family. 

" I know not," he writes, " how the word exciseman, or the still 
more opprobrious gauger, will sound in your ears. I, too, have 
seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very deli- 
cately on this subject; but a wife and children are things which 
have a wonderful power in blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty 



68 BURNS. 

pounds a year for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, 
you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet." 

In announcing to Dr. Blacklock his new employment, he 
says — 

" But what d'ye think, my trusty tier, 
I'm turned a gauger — Peace be here I 
Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, 

Ye'll now disdain me ! 
And then my fifty pounds a year 
Will little gain me. 
***** 
" Ye ken, ye ken 
That Strang necessity supreme is 
'Mang sons o' men. 
I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, 
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies; 
Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, 

I need na vaunt, 
But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies, 
Before they want." 

He would cut brooms and twist willow-ropes before his children 
should want. But perhaps, as the latest editor of Burns's poems 
observes, his best saying on the subject of the excisemanship was 
that word to Lady Glencairn, the mother of his patron, " I would 
much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from 
me, than that I borrowed it from my profession." 

In these words we see something of the bitterness about his 
new employment, which often escaped from him, both in prose and 
verse. Nevertheless, having undertaken it, he set his face hon- 
estly to the work. He had to survey ten parishes, covering a 
tract of not less than fifty miles each way, and requiring him to 
ride two hundred miles a week. Smuggling was then common 
throughout Scotland, both in the shape of brewing and of selling 
beer and whiskey without licence. Burns took a serious yet 
humane view of his duty. To the regular smuggler he is said to 
have been severe ; to the country folk, farmers or cotters, who 
sometimes transgressed, he tempered justice with mercy. Many 
stories are told of his leniency to these last. At Thornhill, on a 
fair day, he was seen to call at the door of a poor woman who for 
the day was doing a little illicit business on her own account. A 
nod and a movement of the forefinger brought the woman to the 
doorway. '".Kate, are you mad ? Don't you know that the super- 
Visor and I will be in upon you in forty minutes ? " Burns at 
once disappeared among the crowd, and the poor woman was 
saved a heavy fine. Another day the poet and a brother gauger 
entered a widow's house at Dunscore and seized a quantity of 
smuggled tobacco. "Jenny," said Burns, " I expected this would 
be the upshot. Here, Lewars, take note of the number of rolls as 
I count them. Now Jack, did you ever hear an auld wife number- 
ing her threads before check-reels were invented ? Thou's ane, 



BURNS. 69 

and thou's no ane, and thou's ane a'out — listen." As he handed 
out the rolls, and numbered them, old-wife fashion, he dropped 
every other roll into Jenny's lap. Lewars took the desired note 
with becoming gravity, and saw as though he saw not. Again, a 
woman who had been brewing, on seeing Burns coming with another 
exciseman, slipped out by the back door, leaving a servant and a 
little girl in the house. " Has there been ony brewing for the fair 
here the day?" "O no, sir, we hae nae licence for that," an- 
swered the servant maid. " That's no true," exclaimed the child; 
"the muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o' yill that my mither 
sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair." ..." We are in a hurry 
just now," said Burns, " but when we return from the fair, we'll 
examine the muckle black kist." In acts like these, and in many 
another anecdote that might be given, is seen the genuine human- 
heartedness of the man, in strange contrast with the bitternesses 
which so often find vent in his letters. Ultimately, as we shall 
see, the exciseman's work told heavily against his farming, his 
poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time before this 
became apparent. The solitary rides through the moors and dales 
that border Nithsdalegave him opportunities, if not for composing 
long poems, at any rate for crooning over those short songs in 
which mainly his genius now found vent. "The visits of the 
muses to me," he writes, "and I believe to most of their acquaint- 
ance, like the visits of good angels, are short and far between ; 
but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills of Niths- 
dale, just as I used to clo on the banks of Ayr." 

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he passed through 
in the summer and autumn of 1789. In the May-time of that yeat 
an incident occurs, which the poet thus describes : — "One morning 
latelv, as I was out pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass- 
seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, 
and presently a poor little wounded hare came -hirpling by me. 
You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who could 
shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have young ones. 
Indeed, there is something in the business of destroying, for our 
sport, individuals in the animal creation that do not injure us ma- 
terially, which I could never reconcile to ray ideas of virtue." The 
lad who fired the shot and roused the poet's indignation, was the 
son of a neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him, and, being near 
the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into the river. He 
found, however, a more innocent vent for his feelings in the follow- 
ing lines : 

" Inhuman man ! curse on thy barbarous art, 
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye ! 
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, 
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart! 

" Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, 
The bitter little that of life remains : 
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains 
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 



JO 



BURNS. 



" Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, 
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed ! 
The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, 
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest. 

° Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe ; 
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side; 
Ah ! helpless nurslings, who will now provide 
That life a mother only can bestow I 

" Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait 

The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, 
I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, 
And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate." 

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems which 
Burns composed in classical Englishes no mere sentimental effusion, 
but expresses what in him was a real part of his nature— his tender 
feeling towards his lower fellow-creatures. The same feeling finds 
expression in the lines on The Mouse, The Auld Farmer 's Address 
to his Mare, The. Winter Night, when, as he sits by his fireside, 
and hears the storm roaring without, he says — 

" I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war. 
Or thro' the drift, decp-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy e'e ? " 

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, Burns had 
tried to compose some poems according to the approved models of 
book-English, we find him presently reverting to his own Doric, 
which he had lately too much abandoned, and writing in good broad 
Scotch his admirably humourous description of Captain Grose, an 
Antiquary, whom he had met at Friars Carse : 

" If ear. Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, 
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats — 
If there's a hole in a' your coats, 

I rede you rent it : 
A chicld's amang you, takin' notes, 

And, faith, he'll prent it. 

*' By some auld, houlet-hatmted biggin, 
Or kirk deserted by its riggin, 



BURNS. j x 

It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in 

Some eldritch part, 
Wi' deils, they say, Lord save's ! colleaguin 
At some black art. 

It's tauld he was a sodjer bred, 
And ane wad rather fa'n tha.i fled ; 
But now he's quat the spurtle-blade, 

And dog-skin wallet, 
And taen the — Antiquarian trade, 

I think they call it- 

**He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets ; 
Rusty aim caps, and jinglin' jackets, 
Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets, 

A towmont gude 
Andpairitch-pats and auld saut-backet 
Before the Flood. 
***** 

" Forbye, he'll shape you aff fu' gleg 
The cut of Adam's philibeg ; 
The knife that nicket Abel's craig 

He'll prove you fully, 
It was a faulding jocteleg 

Or iang-kcjl gjillie." 

Tlii meeting with Captain Grose took placee in the summer of 
1 789, ai.d the stanzas just given were written probably about the same 
time. To the same date belongs his ballad called The Kirk's 
Alarm, in which he once more reverts to the defence of one of 
his old friends of the New Light school, who had got into the 
Church Courts, and was in jeopardy from the attacks of his more 
orthodox brethren. The ballad in itself has little merit, except as 
showing that Burns still clung to the same school of divines to 
which he had early attached himself. In September we find him 
writing in a more serious strain to Mrs. Dunlop, and suggesting 
thoughts which might console her in some affliction under which 
she was suffering. - ; . . . In vain would we reason and pretend to 
doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch ; but when 
I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes and the 
most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human 
belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct." 

That same September, Burns, with his friend Allan Masterton, 
crossed from Nithsdale to Annandale to visit their common friend 
Nicol, who was spending his vacation in Moffatdale. They met 
and spent a night in Nicol's lodging. It was a small thatched 
cottage, near Craigieburn — a place celebrated by Burns in one of 
his songs — and stands on the right-hand side as the traveller 
passes up Moffatdale to Yarrow, between the road and the river. 
Few pass that way now without having the cottage pointed out as 
the place where the three merry comrades met that night. 

"We had such- a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. 
Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should eel- 



72 



BURNS. 



ebrate the business," ana Burns's celebration of it was the famous 
bacchanalian song — 

" O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut, 
And Rob and Allan cam to pree." 

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certainly must 
be pronounced "The king amang them a'." But while no one 
can withhold admiration from the genius and inimitable humour of 
the song, still we read it with very mingled feelings, when we think 
that perhaps it may have helped some topers since Burns's day a 
little faster on the road to ruin. As for the three boon-companions 
themselves, just ten years after that night, Currie wrote, '' These 
three honest fellows — all men of uncommon talents — are now all 
under the turf." And in 1821, John Struthers, a Scottish poet 
little known, but of great worth and some genius, thus recurs to 
Currie's words : — 

" Nae mair in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay, 
Nor Rab, wi' fancy-witching wiles, beguiles the hour o' dawning day ; 
For tho' they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e'e 
Has done its turn ; untimely now the green grass waves o'er a' the 

three." 

Willie brewed a peck d 1 Maut was soon followed by another bac- 
chanalian effusion, the ballad called The Whistle. Three lairds, 
all neighbours of Burns at Ellisland, met at Friars Carse on the 
1 6th of October, 1789. to contend with each other in a drinking- 
bout. The prize was an anciente bony whistle, said to have been 
brought to Scotland in the reign of James the Sixth by a Dane, 
who,"after three days and three nights' contest in hard drinking, 
was overcome by Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton, with whom 
the whistle remained as a trophy. It passed into the Riddell 
family, and now in Burns's time it was to be again contested for 
in same rude orgie. Burns was appointed the bard to celebrate 
the contest. Much discussion has been carried on by his biog- 
raphers as to whether Burns was present or not. Some maintain 
that he sat out the drinking-match, and shared the deep potations, 
Others, and among these his latest editor, Mr. Scott Douglas, 
maintain that he was not present that night in body, but only in 
spirit. Anyhow, the ballad remains a monument, if not of his 
genius, at least of his sympathy with that ancient but now happily 
exploded form of good fellowship. 

This "mighty claret-shed at the Carse," and the ballad com- 
memorative of it, belong to the 16th of October, 1789. It must 
have been within a few days of that merry-meeting that Burns fell 
into another and very different mood, which has recorded itself 
in an immortal lyric. It would seem that from the year 1786 
onwards, a cloud of melancholy generally gathered over the poet's 
soul toward the end of each autumn. This October, as the anni- 
versary of Highland Mary's death drew on, he was observed by 



BURJVS. 



73 



his wife to "grow sad about something-, and to wander solitary 
on the banks of Nith, and about his farm-yard, in the extremest 
agitation of mind nearly the whole night. He screened himself 
on the lee-side of a corn-stack from the cutting edge of the night 
wind, and lingered till approaching dawn wiped out the stars, one 
by one, from the firmament." Some more details Lockhart lias 
added, said to have been received from Mrs. Burns, but these the 
latest editor regards as mythical. However this may be, it would 
appear that it was only after his wife had frequently entreated him 
that he was persuaded to return to his home, where he sat down 
and wrote, as they now stand, these pathetic lines : 

"Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, 

That lovest to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usherest in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
O Mary ! dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ? " 

That Burns should have expressed, in such rapid succession, 
the height of drunken revelry in Millie brewed a Peck o 1 Maut and 
in the ballad of The Whistle, and then the depth of despondent 
regret in the lines To Mary in Heaven, is highly characteristic of 
him. To have many moods belongs to the poetic nature, but no 
poet ever passed more rapidly than Burns from one pole of feeling 
to its very opposite. Such a poem as this last could not possibly 
have proceeded from any but the deepest and m8st genuine feeling. 
Once again, at the same season, three years later (1792). his thoughts 
went back to Highland Mary, and he poured forth his last sad wail 
for her in the simpler, not less touching song, beginning — 

" Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery! 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never drumlie ; 
There simmer first unfauld her robes, 

And there the langest tarry ; 
For there I took the last Fareweel 

O' my sweet Highland Mary." 

It would seem as though these retrospects were always accom- 
panied by special despondency. For, at the very time he com- 
posed this latter song, he wrote thus to his faithful friend, Mrs. 
Dunlop : 

" Alas ! who would wish for many years ? What is it but to 
drag existence until our joys gradually expire, and leave us in a 
night of misery, like the gloom which blots out the stars, one by 
one, from the face of heaven, and leaves us without a ray of com- 
fort in the howling waste ? " 

To fits of hypochondria and deep dejection he had, as he him- 



74 



BURKS. 



self tells u«, been subject, from his earliest manhood, and he at- 
tributes to overtoil in boyhood this tendency which was probably 
a part of his natural temperament. To a disposition like his, rap-- 
tures, exaltations, agonies, came as naturally as a uniform neutral- 
tinted existence to more phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure 
that every cause of self-reproach which his past life had stored up 
in his memory tended to keep him more and more familiar with the 
lower pole in that fluctuating scale. 

Besides these several poems which mark the variety of moods 
which swept over him during the summer and autumn of 1789, 
there was also a continual succession of songs on the anvil in prep- 
aration for Johnson's Museum. This work of song-making, be- 
gun during his second winter in Edinburgh, was carried on with 
little intermission during all the Ellisland period. The songs were 
on all kinds of subjects, and of all degrees of excellence, but hardly 
one, even the most trivial, was without some small touch which 
could have come from no hand but that of Burns. Sometimes 
they were old songs with a stanza or two added. Oftener an old 
chorus or single line was taken up, and made the hint out of which 
a new and original song was woven. At other times they were en- 
tirely original both in subject and in expression, though cast in the 
form of the ancient minstrelsy. Among so many and so rapidly 
succeeding efforts, it was only now and then, when a happier mo- 
ment of inspiration was granted him, that there came forth one 
song of supreme excellence, perfect alike in conception and in 
expression. The consummate song of this summer (1789) was 
John Anderson my Joe, John, just as Auld Lang Syne and 
The Silver TassieAx&<\ been those of the former year. 

During the remainder of the year 1789 Burns seems to have 
continued more or less in the mood of mind indicated by the lines 
To Mary in Heaven. He was suffering from nervous derange- 
ment, and this, as usual with him, made him despondent. This 
is the way in which he writes to Mrs. Dunlop on the 13th Decem- 
ber, 1789: 

'• i am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous sys- 
tem—a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happi- 
ness, or the most productive of our misery. For now near three 
weeks I have been so ill with a nervous headache, that I have been 
obliged for a time to give up my Excise-books, being scarce able 
to lift my head, much less to ride once a week over ten muir 
parishes. What is man ? . . ." 

And then he goes on to moralise in a half-believing, half-doubt- 
ing kind of way, on the probability of a life to come, and ends by 
speaking of, or rather apostrophising, Jesus Christ in a strain 
which would seem to savour of Socinianism. This letter he calls 
"a distracted scrawl which the writer dare scarcely read." And 
yet it appears to have been deliberately copied with some amplifi- 
cation from an entry in his last year's commonplace-book. Even 
the few passages from his correspondence already given are enough 
to show that there was in Burns's letter-writing something strained 



BURNS. 



75 



and artificial. But such discoveries as this seem to reveal an ex- 
tent of effort, and even of artifice, which one would hardly other- 
wise iiave guessed at. 

In the same strain of harassment as the preceding extract, but 
pointing to another and more definite cause of it, is the following, 
written on the 20th December, 1789^0 Provost Maxwell of Loch- 
maben : 

" My poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked and 
bedevilled with the task of the superlatively damned, to make one 
guinea do the business of three, that I detest abhor, and swoon at 
the very word business, though no less than four letters of my very 
short surname are in it." The rest of the letters goes off in a wild 
rollicking strain, inconsistent enough with his more serious 
thoughts. But the part of it above given points to a very real 
reason for his growing discontent with Ellisland. 

By the beginning of 1790 the hopelessness of his farming pros- 
pects pressed on him still more heavily, and formed one ingredient 
in the mental depression with which he saw a hew year dawn. 
Whether he did wisely in attempting the Excise business, who 
shall now say ? In one respect it seemed a substantial gain. But 
this gain was accompanied by counterbalancing disadvantages. 
The new duties more and more withdrew him from the farm, 
which, in order to give it any chance of paying, required not only 
the aid of the master's hand, but the undivided oversight of the 
master's eye. In fact, farming to profit and Excise-work were in- 
compatible, and a very few months' trial must have convinced 
Burns of this. ■ But besides rendering regular farm industry im- 
possible, the weekly absences from home, which his new duties en- 
tailed, had other evil consequences. They brought with them 
continual mental distraction, which forbade all sustained poetic 
effort, and laid him perilously open to indulgences which were sure 
to undermine regular habits and peace of mind. About this time 
(the beginning of 1790), we begin to hear of frequent visits to Dum- 
fries on Excise business, and of protracted lingerings at a certain 
howjf, place of resort, called the Globe Tavern, which boded no 
good. There were also intromissions with a certain company of 
players then resident in Dumfries, and writings of such prologues 
for their second-rate pieces, as many a penny-a-liner could have 
done to order as well. Political ballads, too, came from his pen, 
siding with this or that party in local elections, all which things as 
we read, we feel as if we saw some noble high-bred racer harnessed 
to a dust-cart. 

His letters during the first half of 1790 betoken the same rest- 
less, unsatisfied spirit as those written towards the end of the pre- 
vious year. Only we must be on our guard against interpreting 
his real state of mind too exclusively from his letters. For it seems 
to have been his habit when writing to his friends to take one 
mood of mind, which happened to be uppermost in him for the 
moment, and with which he knew that his correspondent sympa- 
thised, and to dwell on this so exclusively that for the moment it 



76 BURNS. 

filled his whole mental horizon, and shut out every other thought. 
And not this only, which is the tendency of all ardent and impul- 
sive natures, but we cannot altogether excuse Burns of at times 
half-consciously exaggerating these momentary moods, almost for 
certain stage effects which they produced. It is necessary, there- 
fore, in estimating his real condition at any time, to set against the 
account, which he gives of himself in his letters, the evidence of 
other facts, such as the testimony of those who met him from time 
to time, and who have left some record of those interviews. This 
I shall now do for the first half of the year 1790, and shall place, 
over against his self-revelations, some observations which show 
how he at this time appeared to others. 

An intelligent man named William Clark, who had served Burns 
as a ploughman at Ellisland during the winter half-year of 1789-90, 
survived till 1838. and in his old age gave this account of his for- 
mer master : " Burns kept two men and two woman servants, but 
he invariably when at home took his meals with his wife and fam- 
ily in the little parlour." Clark thought he was as good a manager 
of land as most of the farmers in the neighbourhood. The farm of 
Ellisland was moderately rented, and was susceptible of much im- 
provement, had improvement been then in repute. Burns some- 
times visited the neighbouring farmers, and they returned the com- 
pliment; but that way of spending time was not so common then 
as now. No one thought that the poet and his writings would be 
so much noticed afterwards. He kept nine or ten milch cows, some 
young cattle, four horses, and several pet sheep : of the latter he 
was very fond. During the winter and springtime, when not en- 
gaged in Excise business, " he sometimes held the plough for an 
hour or two for him (W. Clark), and was a fair workman. During 
seed-time, Burns might be frequently seen at an early hour in the 
fields with his sowing sheet; but as he was often called away on 
business, he did not sow the whole of,his grain." 

This old man went on to describe Burns as a kindly and indul- 
gent master, who spoke familiarly to his servants, both at home 
and a-field ; quick tempered when anything put.himout, but quickly 
pacified. Once only Clark saw him really angry, when one of 
the lasses had nearly choked one of the cows by giving her pota- 
toes not cut small enough. Burns's looks, gestures, and voice were 
then terrible. Clark slunk out of the way, and when he returned, 
his master was quite calm again. When there was extra work to 
be done, he would give his servants a dram, but he was by no means 
over-flush in this way. During the six months of his service, Clark 
never once saw Burns intoxicated or incapable of managing his 
business. The poet, when at home, used to wear a broad blue bon- 
net, a long-tailed coat, drab or blue, corduroy breeches, dark blue 
stockings, with cootikens or gaiters. In cold weather he would 
have a plaid of black and white check wrapped round his shoulders. 
The same old man describes Mrs. Burns as a good and prudent 
housewife, keeping everything neat and tidy, well liked by her ser- 
vants, for whom she provided good and abundant fare. When they 



BURNS. 77 

parted, Burns paid Clark his wages in Ml, gave him a written 
character, ahd a "shilling for a - fairing. 

In the summer or autumn of the same year the scholarly Ram- 
say of Ochtertyre in the course of a tour looked in on Burns, and 
here is the record ot his visit which Ramsay gave in a letter to 
Currie " Seeing him pass quickly near Closeburn, I said to my 
companion, ' That is Burns.' On coming to the inn, the hostler 
told us he would be back in a few hours to grant permits ; that 
Where he met with anything seizable, he was no better than any 
other <rauo-er ; in everything else that he was perfectly a gentleman. 
After leavinor a note to be delivered to him on his return, I pro- 
ceeded to his house, being curious to see his Jean. I was much 
pleased with his ' uxor Sabina qualis,' and the poet s modest man- 
sion, so unlike the habitation of ordinary rustics. In the evening 
he suddenly bounced in upon us, and said, as he entered, ' 1 come > 
to use the words of Shakespeare, stewed in haste? In fact, he had 
ridden incredibly fast after receiving my note. We fell into con- 
versation directly, and soon got into the mare magnum of poetry. 
He told me he had not gotten a subject for a drama, which he was 
to call Rob McQuechaii's Elshiu, fro rri a popular story of Robert 
Bruce being defeated on the water of Cairn, when the heel of 
his boot having loosened in his flight, he applied to Robert Mac- 
Qutjchan to fit it, who, to make sure, ran his awl nine inches up 
the king's heel We were now going on at a great rate, when Mr. 
Stewart popped in his head, which put a stop to our discourse, 
which had become very interesting. Yet in a little while it was re- 
sumed, and such was the force and versatility of the bard's genius, 
that he made the tears run down Mr. Stewart's cheeks, albeit un- 
used to the poetic strain. From that time we met no more, and I 
was grieved at the reports of him afterwards. Poor Burns ! we shall 
hardly ever see his like again. He was, in truth, a sort of comet in 
literature, irregular in its motions, which did no good, proportioned 
to the blaze of light it displayed." 

It seems that during this autumn there came a momentary blink 
in Burns's clouded sky, a blink which, alas ! never brightened into 
full sunshine. He had been but a year in the Excise employment, 
when, through the renewed kindness of Mr. Graham of Fintray, 
there seemed a near prospect of his being promoted to a supervisor- 
ship, which would have given him an income of 200/. a year. So 
probable at the time did it seem, that his friend Nicol wrote to 
Ainslie expressing some fears that the poet might turn his back 
on his old friends when to the pride of applauded genius vvas^added 
the pride of office and income. This may have been ironical on 
Nicol's part, but he might have spared his irony on his friend, for 
the promotion never came. 

But what had Burns been doing for the last year in poetic pro- 
duction? In this respect the whole interval between the composi- 
tion of the lines To Mary in Heaven, in October, 1789, and the 
autumn of the succeeding year, is almost a blank. Three elec- 
tioneering ballads, besides a' few trivial pieces, make up the whole. 



y8 BUR /VS. 

There is not a line written by him during this year which it it were 
deleted from his works, would anyway impair his poetic fame. 
But this long barrenness was atoned for by a burst of inspiration 
which came on him in the fall of 1790, and struck off at one heat 
the matchless Tale of Tain o' Shunter. It was to the meeting al- 
ready noticed of Burns with Captain- Grose, the antiquary, at Friars 
Carse, that we owe this wonderful poem. The poet and the anti 
quary suited each other exactly, and they soon became. 

"Unco pack and thick thegither." 

Burns asked his friend, when he reached Ayrshire, to make a draw- 
ing of Alloway kirk, and include it in his sketches, for it was dear 
to him because it was the resting-place of his father, and there he 
himself might some day lay his bones. To induce Grose to do this, 
Burns told him that Alloway kirk was the scene of many witch 
stories and weird sights. The antiquary replied, " Write you a 
poem on the scene, and I'll put in the verses with an engraving of 
the ruin." Burns having found a fitting day and hour, when "his 
barmy noddle was working prime," walked out to his favourite path 
down the western bank of the river. 

The poem was the work of one day, of which Mrs. Burns re- 
tained a vivid recollection. Her husband had spent most of the 
day by the river side, and in the afternoon she joined him with her 
two children. He was busily engaged crooning- to hints el ; and 
Mrs. Burns, perceiving that her presence was an interruption, loi- 
tered behind with her little ones among the broom. Her attention 
was presently attracted by the strange and wild gesticulations of 
the bard, who was now seen at some distance, agonised with an 
ungovernable access of joy. He was reciting very loud, and with 
tears rolling down his cheeks, those animated verses which he had 
just conceived — 

" Now Tarn ! O Tarn! had thae been queans, 
A' plump and strappin' in their teens." 

" I wish ye had seen him," said his wife ; " he was in such 
ecstasy that the tears were happing down his cheeks." These last 
words are given by Allan Cunningham, in addition to the above 
account, which Lockhart got from a manuscript journal of Cromek. 
The poet having committed the verses to writing on the top of his 
sod-dvke above the water, came into the house, and read them im- 
mediately in high triumph at the fireside. 

Thus in the case of two of Burns's best poems, we have an ac- 
count of the bard as he appeared in his hour of insp'rat on, not to 
any literary friend bent on pictorial effect, but from the plain narra- 
tive of his simple and admiring wife. Burns speaks of Tarn 0'' 
Shanter as his first attemot at a tale in verse — unfortunately it was 
also his last. He himself regarded it as his master-piece of all his 
poems, and posterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment. 

In this, one of his happiest flights, Burns's imagination bore 



BURNS. 



79 



him from the vale of Nith back to the banks of Doon, and to the 
weird tales he had there heard in childhood, told by the winter 
firesides. The characters of the poem have been identified ; that 
of Tam is taken from a farmer, Douglas Graham, who lived at the 
farm of Shanter, in the parish of Kirkoswald. He had a scolding 
wife, called Helen McTaggart, and the tombstones of both are 
pointed out in Kirkoswald kirkyard. Souter Johnnie is more un- 
certain, but is supposed, with some probability, to have been John 
Davidson, a shoemaker, who lies buried in the same place. Yet, 
from Burns's poem we would gather that this latter lived in Ayr. 
But these things matter little. From his experience of the smug- 
gling farmers of Kirkoswald, among whom "he first became ac- 
quainted with scenes of swaggering and riot," and his remembrance 
of the tales that haunted the spot where he passed his childhood, 
combined with his knowledge of the peasantry, their habits and 
superstitions, Burns's imagination wove the inimitable tale. 

After this, the best poetic offspring of the Ellisland period, 
Burns composed only a few short pieces during his tenancy of that 
farm. Among these, however, was one which cannot be passed 
over. In January, 1791, the Earl of Glencairn, who had been his 
first, and it may be almost said, his only real friend and patron 
among the Scottish peerage, died at the early age of forty -two, just 
as he returned to Falmouth after a vain search for health abroad. 
Burns had always loved and honoured Lord Glencairn, as well he 
might — although his lordship's gentleness had not always missed 
giving offence to the poet's sensitive and proud spirit. Yet, on the 
whole, he was the best patron whom Burns had found, or was ever 
to find among his countrymen. When then he heard of the earl's 
death, he mourned his loss as that of a true friend, and poured forth 
a fine lament, which concludes with the following well-known lines : 

" The bridegroom mav forget the bride, 

Was made his wedded wife yestreen; 
The monarch may forget the crown, 

That on his head an hour has been ; 
The mother may forget the child, 

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee ; 
But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 

And a' that thou hast done for me." 

Burns's elegies, except when they are comical, are not among 
his happiest efforts. Some of them are frigid and affected, But 
this was the genuine language of sincere grief. He afterwards 
showed the permanence of his affection by calling one of his boys 
James Glencairn. 

A few songs make up the roll of the Ellisland productions dur- 
ing 1 791. One only of these is noteworthy — that most popular 
song The Banks 0' Doon. His own words in sending it to a friend 
are these: — "March, 1 79 f . While here I sit, sad and solitary, by 
the side of a fire, in a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, 
in pops a poor fellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. 



8o BURNS. 

&y heavens ! say I to myself, with a tide of good spirits, which the 
magic of that sound, ' Auld Toon o' Ayr,' conjured up, I will send 
my last song to Mr. Ballantine." 

Then he gives the second and best version of the song, begin- 
ning thus : 

" Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, 
How can ye blume sae fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
And I sae fu' o' care ! " 

The latest edition of Burns's works, by Mr. Scott Douglas, gives 
three different versions of this song. Any one who will compare 
these, will see the truth of that remark of the poet, in one of his 
letters to Dr. Moore, " I have no doubt that the knack, the aptitude 
to learn the Muses' trade is a gift bestowed by Him who forms the 
secret bias of the soul ; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the 
profession is the fruit of industry, attention, labour, and pains ; at 
least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience." 

The second version was that which Burns wrought out by care- 
ful revision, from an earlier one. Compare, for instance, with the 
verse given above, the first verse as originally struck off : 

" Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon, 
The spreading flowers are fair, 
And everything is blythe and glad, 
But I am fu' of care." 

And the other changes he made on the first draught are all in 
the way of improvement. It is painful to know, on the authority 
of Allan Cunningham, that he who composed this pure and per- 
fect song, and many another such, sometimes chose to work in 
baser metal, and that song-ware of a lower kind escaped from his 
hands into the press, and could never afterwards be recalled. 

When Burns told Dr. Moore that he was resolved to try by the 
test of experience the doctrine that good and permanent poetry 
could not be composed without industry and pains, he had in view 
other and wider plans of composition than any which he ever real- 
ised. He told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, as we have seen, that he had 
in view to render into poetry a tradition he had found of an adven- 
ture in humble life which Bruce met with during his wanderings. 
Whether he did more than think over the story of Rob Mac> 
Quechan's Elshin, cr into what poetic form he intended to cast it, we 
know not. As Sir Walter said, any poem he might have produced 
on this subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous 
feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king 
alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and 
that power of combining the most homely and humorous incidents 
with the pathetic and sublime, which he displayed in Tarn o' Shan,' 
ter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom 



BURNS. S>1 

from care which would have allowed him to try his hand on a sub- 
ject so entirely to his mind. 

Besides this, he had evidently, during his sojourn at Ellisland, 
meditated some large dramatic attempt. He wrote to one of his 
correspondents that he had set himselt to study Shakespeare, and 
intended to master all the greatest dramatists, both of England and 
France, with a view to a dramatic effort of his own. If he had at- 
tempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would 
have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish 
dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had 
shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he 
might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that 
he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, un- 
pleasant as from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein 
in a very high degree, seeing that from materials so unpromising 
he could make so much. As Mr. Lockhart has said, " That extra- 
ordinary sketch, coupled with his later lyrics in a higher vein, is 
enough to show that in him we had a master capable of placing 
the musical drama on a level with the loftiest of our classical 
forms." 

Regrets have been expressed that Burns, instead of addressing 
himself to these high poetic enterprises, which had certainly hov- 
ered before him, frittered away so much of his time in composing 
for musical collections a large number of songs, the very abundance 
of which must have lessened their quality. And yet it may be 
doubted whether this urgent demand for songs, made on him by 
Johnson and Thomson, was not the only literary call to which he 
would in his circumstances have responded. These calls could be 
met, by sudden efforts, at leisure moments, when some occasional 
blink of momentary inspiration came over him. Great poems 
necessarily presuppose that the original inspiration is sustained by 
concentrated purpose and long-sustained effort ; mental habits, 
which to a nature like Burns's must have at all times been difficult, 
and which his circumstances during his later years rendered simply 
impossible. From the first he had seen that Ids farm would not 
pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this conviction. 
To escape what he calls " the crushing grip of poverty, which 
alas ! I fear, is less or more fatal to the worth and purity of the 
noblest souls," he had, within a year after entering Ellisland, re- 
course to Excise work. This he did from a stern sense of duty to 
his wife and family. It was, in fact, one of the most marked in- 
stances in which Burns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put 
pride in his pocket, and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he 
had not accepted the yoke without some painful sense of degrada- 
tion, is shown by the bitterness of many of his remarks, when in 
his correspondence he alludes to the subject. There were, how* 
ever, times when he tried to take a brighter view of it, and to per- 
suade himself, as he says in a letter to Lady Harriet Don, that 
"one advantage he had in this new business was the knowledge it 
gave him of the various shades of character in man — consequently 



8 2 BLTKA r S. 

assisting him in his trade as a poet." But, alas ! whatever advan- 
tages in this way it might have brought, were counteracted tenfold 
by other circumstances that attended it. The continual calls of a 
responsible business, itself sufficient to occupy a man — when de- 
vided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked his powers, and 
left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time to time croon- 
ing over a random song. Then the habits which his roving Ex- 
cise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social than 
that of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was 
in this way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a power- 
ful hand. u From the castle to the cottage, every door flew open 
at his approach ; and the old system of hospitality, then flourish- 
ing, rendered it difficult for the most soberly inclined guest to rise 
from any man's board in the same trim that he sat down to it. The 
farmer, if Burns was seen passing, left his reapers, and trotted 
by the side of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that 
the day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he en- 
tered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the 
news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere 
ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were 
assembled round the ingle ; the largest punch-bowl produced, 
and — 

' Be ours to-night — who knows what comes to-morrow ? ' 

was the language of every one in the circle that welcomed him. 
The highest gentry of the neighbourhood when bent on special, 
merriment, did not think the occasion complete unless the wit 
and eloquence of Burns were called in to enliven their carousals." 

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must 
have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on high objects, 
not to speak of the habits of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. 
The frequent visits to Dumfries which his Excise work entailed, and 
the haunting of the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to con- 
sequences which, more than even deep potations, must have been 
fatal to his peace. 

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before pass- 
ing, however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life 
since manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be 
mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the 
Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a 
copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, Essay on 
Taste, which contained the authorised exposition of that theory, so 
congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us 
only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which 
have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, 
acknowledging the receipt of his book, Burns says, " I own, sir, 
at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradox- 
ical : that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it 
vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of 
a Jew's-harp ; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the 



BURA?S. 



83 



half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely 
more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; 
and that from something innate and independent of all association 
of ideas — these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths 
until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce 
this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them 
without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald 
Stewart expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman 
should have found li a distinct conception of the general principles 
of the doctrine of association;" on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, 
" We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of as- 
sociation had been of old familiar to him." 

In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled 
by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. 
He had been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh 
friend a schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when 
all at once he breaks out : " God help the children of Dependence ! 
Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas ! almost 
unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect and Jre- 
proach, under the thin disguise' of cold civility and humiliating ad- 
vice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his inde- 
pendence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in 
civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as 
the caprice of a fellow-creature ! Every man has his virtues, and 
no man is without his failings ; and curse on that privileged plain- 
speaking of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot 
reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out 
those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my 
present distress. ... I do not want to be independent that I may 
sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning." 

What may have been the cause of this ferocious explosion 
there is no explanation. Whether the real source of it may not 
have lain in certain facts which had occurred during the past 
spring, that must have rudely broken in on the peace at once of 
his conscience and his home, we cannot say. Certainlv it does 
seem, as Chambers suggests, like one of those sudden outbursts of 
temper which fasten on some mere passing accident, because the 
real seat of it lies too deep for words. Some instances of the 
same temper we have already seen. This is a sample of a grow- 
ing exasperation of spirit, which found expression from time to 
time till the close of his life. 

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices 
we get of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. 
Two English gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him; 
one of whom has left an amusing account of their reception. Call- 
ing at his house, they were told that the poet was by the river side, 
and thither they went in search of him. On a rock that projected 
into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular 
appearance. He had a cap of fox's skin on his head, a loose 
great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended ar 4 enor- 



84 BURNS. 

mous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns. He received them 
with great cordiality, and asked them to share his humble 
dinner — an invitation which they accepted. " On the table they 
found boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after the 
manner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them ingenu- 
ously that he had no wine, nothing better than Highland whis- 
key, a bottle of which he set on the board. He produced at 
the same time his punch-bowl, made of Inverary marble; and. 
mixing it with water and sugar, filled their glasses and invited 
them to drink. The travellers were in haste, and, besides, the 
flavour of the whiskey to their southern palates was scarcely toler- 
able ; but the generous poet offered them his best, and his ardent 
hospitality they found impossible to resist. Burns was in his hap- 
piest mood, and the charm of his conversation was altogether 
fascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, illuminating what- 
ever he touched. He related the tales of his infancy and youth ; 
he recited some of his gayest and some of his tenderest poems; 
in the wildest- of his strains of mirth he threw in some touches of 
melancholy, and spread around him the electric emotions of his 
powerful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavour; 
the marble bowl was again and again emptied and replenished ; the 
guests of our poet forgot the flight of time and the dictates of pru- 
dence ; at the hour of midnight they lost their way to Dumfries, 
and could scarcely distinguish it when assisted by the morning's 
dawn. There is much naivete in the way the English visitor nar- 
rates his experience of that 'nicht wi' Burns.'" 

Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incredulously at 
the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the broadsword. But 
of the latter appendage this is not the only record. Burns himself 
mentions it as a frequent accompaniment of his when he went out 
by the river. 

The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his father-in- 
law had wrought for him as a marriage-gift. It was, when Cham- 
bers wrote his biography of Burns, in the possession of Mr. Hais- 
tie, than M.P. for Paisley, who is said to have refused for it three 
hundred guineas — " a sum," says Chambers, "that would have set 
Burns on his legs forever." 

This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home at Ellis- 
land till the end came. We have seen that he had long deter- 
mined, if possible, to get rid of his farm. He had sunk in it all 
the proceeds that remained to him from the sale of the second 
edition of his poems, and for this the crops he had hitherto reaped 
had given no adequate return. Three years, however, wer a 
short trial, and there was a good time coming for all farmers, when 
the war with France broke out, and raised the value of farm pro- 
duce to a hitherto unknown amount. If Burns could but have 
waited for that ! — but either he could not, or he would not wait. 
But the truth is, even if Burns ever had it in him to succeed as 
a farmer, that time was past when he came to Ellisland. Inde- 
pendence at the plough-tail, of which he often boasted, was no 



BURNS. 85 

longer possible for him. He could no more work as he had done 
of yore. The habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too 
deeply. Even if he had not been withdrawn from his farm by Ex- 
cise duties, he could neither work continuously himself, nor make 
his servants work. "Faith," said a neighbouring farmer, "how 
could he miss but fail ? He brought with him a bevy of servants 
from Ayrshire. The lasses did nothing but bake bread (that is, 
oat-cakes), and the lads sat by the fireside and ate it warm with 
ale." Burns meanwhile enjoying himself at the house of some 
jovial farmer or convivial laird. How could he miss but fail ? 

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an arrangement 
was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was 
allowed to throw up his lease and sell off his crops. The sale 
took place in the last week in August (1791). Eveu at this day 
the auctioneer and the bottle always appear side by side, as Cham- 
bers observes ; but then far more than now-a-days. After the 
roup, that is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his 
letters, describes the scene that took place within and without his 
house. It was one which exceeded anything he had ever seen in 
drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her family fortunately were not 
there to witness it, having gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, 
probably to be out of the way of all the pain that accompanies the 
breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, 
Mr. Millar, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, because the 
farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situated, on a different 
side of the river from the rest of his estate. It was in November 
or December that Burns sold off his farm-stock and implements of 
husbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town of 
Dumfries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan 
Cunningham tells us, " but a putting-stone with which he loved to 
exercise his strength, and 300/. of his money, sunk beyond redemp- 
tion in a speculation from which all had augured happiness." 

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's 
departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on 
earth in which he could have been happy, and fulfilled his genius, 
it would have been on such a farm — always providing that it could 
have given him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he 
himself could have guided his ways aright. That he might have 
had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have 
met some landlord who could have acted towards him, as the pres- 
ent Duke of Buccleuch did towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his 
later days, and have given a farm on which he could have sat rent- 
free. Such an act, one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable 
alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would 
have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity put in his 
way of employing a small part of his wealth for so good an end. 
But the notions of modern society, founded as they are so entirely 
on individual independence, for the most part preclude the doino- 
and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no 
man was ever more filled than Burns. 



86 BUR AS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 

A GREAT change it must have been to pass from the pleasant 
holms and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home 
in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession 
visible to the world of what Burns himself had long felt, that his 
endeavour to combine the actual and the ideal, his natural calling as 
a farmer with the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that 
henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in it- 
self nor in its surroundings, had anything to redeem it from com- 
monplace drudgery. He must have felt, from the time when he 
first became Exciseman, that he had parted company with all 
thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he 
might now do in that way must be by random snatches. To his 
proud spirit the name of ganger must have been gall and wormwood, 
and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his wife and chil- 
dren he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a social ob- 
loquy. It would have been well for him if this had been the only 
drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it 
led him exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was 
least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits 
had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic 
concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the society 
into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal work 
which had been already begun. His biographers, though with va- 
rying degrees of emphasis, on the whole, agree that, from the time 
he settled in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards." 

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went 
to live in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provin- 
cial towns in Scotland. What that Was, Dr. Chambers has depicted 
from his own youthful experience of just such another country town. 
The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of 
their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle ; either men living 
on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time 
but half employed ; their only amusement to meet in taverns, 
soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. "The weary waste 
of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was de- 
plorable. Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial 
occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, these re 



BURNS. 



87 



lieved now and then by a song" — such Chambers describes as the 
items which made up provincial life in his younger days. " A life," 
he says, "it was without progress or profit, or anything that tended 
to moral elevation." For such dull companies to get a spirit like 
Burns among them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, 
what a windfall it must have been ! But for him to put his time 
and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation ! Dur- 
ing the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough in doing his 
duty as an Exciseman. This could now be clone with less travel- 
ling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him, as for- 
merly, to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small 
house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family 
ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he 
bad sung — 

" To make a happy fire-side clime, 
For weans and wife, 
Is the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. 
Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement 
drove him forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy 
cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other 
such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm wel- 
come, ahundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was 
not inaccessible ; while their humble station did not jar in any way 
on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with 
his love of pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had 
the gratification of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, 
cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that 
growing dislike to the rich and titled, which was observed in him 
after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he 
did not shrink from the society of the greatest magnates, and when 
they showed him that deference which he thought his due, he even 
enjoyed it. But now so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of 
the upper classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, cr 
alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly " crushed the 
offender in an epigram, or insulted him by some sarcastic sally." 
In a letter written during his first year at Dumfries, this is the way 
he speaks of his daily occupations : — "Hurry of business, grinding 
the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of 
the Excise, making ballads, and then drinking and singing them; 
and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publi- 
cations." But besides these duties by day and the convivialities 
by night, there were other calls on his time and strength, to which 
Burns was by his reputation exposed. When those of the country 
gentry whom he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, of 
when any party of strangers passing through the town had an idle 
evening on their hands, it seems to have been their custom to sum- 
mon Burns to assist them in spending it ; and he was weak enough, 



88 BURNS. 

on receiving the message, to leave his home and adjourn to the 
Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink with them 
late into the night, and waste his powers for their amusement. 
Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines ! 
To one such invitation his impromptu answer was — 

"The king's most humble servant, I 
Can scarcely spare a minute ; 
But I'll be with you by-and-by, 
Or else the devil's in it." 

And this we may be sure was the spirit of many another reply 
to these ill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on 
these occasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better 
stead, and repelled such unjustifiable intrusions. But in this, 
as in so many other respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of 
men. 

From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear 
that he was gradually dropped out of an acquaintance by most of 
the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and 
all other ministers. I have only conversed with one person who 
remembered in his boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son 
of a Dumfriesshire baronet, the representative of the House of 
Redgauntlet. The poet was frequently in the neighbouihood of the 
baronet's country seat, but the old gentleman so highly disapproved 
of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade his sons to have anything to 
do with him. My informant, therefore, though he had often seen, 
had never spoken to the poet. When I conversed with hirn, his 
age was nigh four-score years, and the one thing he remembered 
about Burns was "the blink of his black eye." This is probably 
but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regarded by 
most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the vari- 
ous ingredients that made up their dislike of him it is not easy now 
exactly to determine. Politics most likely had a good deal to do 
with it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig 
and something more. Though politics may have formed the chief, 
they were not probably the only element in their aversion. Yet 
though the majority of the county families turned their backs on 
him, there were some with which he still continued intimate. 

These were either the few Whig magnates of the southern 
counties, whose political projects he supported by electioneering 
ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could wield; or 
those still fewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make 
them willing, for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical 
politics and his irregular life. Among these latter was a younger 
brother of Burns's old friend, Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who 
with his wife had settled at a place four miles from Dumfries, for- 
merly called Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Riddel's maiden 
name, Woodley Park. Mrs. Riddel was handsome, clever, witty, 
not without some tincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. 



BURNS. 39 

Sheand her husband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where 
for two years he was a constant and favourite guest. The lady's 
wit and literary taste found, it may be believed, no other so respon- 
sive spirit in all the south of Scotland. In the third year came a 
breach in their friendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns 
on the lady, because she did not at once accept his apology; then 
a period of estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels 
forgave the insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the 
end came, Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do 
honour to his memory when he was gone. 

It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the 
time of Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close 
of 1 791, he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by 
the news that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in 
search of the husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's mar- 
riage the silence between them seems to have been broken by only 
two letters to Clarinda from Ellisland. In the first of these he 
resents the name of " villain," with which she appears to have sa- 
luted him. In the second he admits that his past conduct had been 
wrong, but concludes by repeating his error and enclosing a song 
addressed to her in the most exaggerated strain of love. Nov/ he 
rushed to Edinburgh to see her once more before she sailed. The 
interview was a brief and hurried one, and no record of it remains, 
except some letters and a few impassioned lyrics which about that 
time he addressed to her. The first letter is stiff and formal, as if 
to break the ice of long estrangement. The others are in the last 
strain of rapturous devotion — language which, if feigned, is the 
height of folly; if real, is worse. The lyrics are some of them 
strained and artificial. One, however, stands out from all the rest, 
as one of the most impassioned effusions that Burns ever poured 
forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in which Scott, 
Byron, and many more, saw concentrated " the essence of a thou- 
sand love-tales " — 

" Had we never loved so kindlv, 
Had we never loved so blindly; 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted." 

After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, 
but without having recovered her truant husband. On her return, 
one or two more letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated 
strain — the last in June, 1794 — after which Clarinda disappears 
from the scene. 

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his 
Dumfries sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing 
songs of fancied love. By the attentions which the wayward hus- 
band was continually paying to ladies and others into whose society 
his wife could not accompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean," 
it may easily be conceived, must have been severely tried. 



9° 



BURA T S. 



It would have been well, however, it stray flirtations and Pla- 
tonic affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But 
there is a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in 
connexion with the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need 
not be repeated here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel 
of long-suffering and forgivingness ; but the way she bore those 
wrongs must have touched her husband's better nature, and pierced 
him to the quick. When his calmer moments came, that very mild- 
ness must have made him feel, as nothing else could, what self- 
reproach was, and what 

" Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood." 

To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been truly attrib- 
uted those bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with 
society which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in 
those of his later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have 
been given; more might easily have been added. The injuries he 
may have received from the world and society, what were they 
compared with those which he could not help feeling that he had 
inflicted on himself ? It is whtn a man's own conscience is agains( 
him that the world looks worst. 

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time 
began to dabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious 
trouble. Before this, though he had passed for a sort of Jacobite, 
he had been in reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he 
had consorted more with Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had 
not in any marked way committed himself as a partisan. The only 
exception to this were some expressions in his poetry favourable 
to the Stuarts, and his avowed dislike to the Brunswick dynasty. 
Yet, notwithstanding these, his Jacobitism was but skin deep. It 
was only with him, as with so many another Scot of that day, the 
expression of his discontent with the Union of 1707, and his 
sense of the national degradation that had followed it. When in 
song he sighed to see Jamie come hame, this was only a sentimen- 
tal protest against the existing order of things. But by the time 
he came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, and the 
whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark with coming 
change. The French Revolution was in full swing, and vibrations 
of it were felt in the remotest corners of Europe. These reached 
even to the dull provincial towns of Scotland, and roused the pot- 
house politicians with whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and 
other taverns, to unwonted excitement. Under this new stimulus, 
Burns's previous Jacobitism passed towards the opposite, but. not 
very distant, extreme of Jacobinism. At these gatherings we may 
easily imagine that, with his native eloquence, his debating power, 
trained in the Tarbolton Club, and his ambition to shine as a public 
speaker, the voice of Burns would be the loudest and most velie* 
ment. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these were words which must 
have found an echo in his inmost heart. But it was not only the 



BMINS. 



9 1 



abstract rights of man, but the concrete wrongs of Scotland that 
would be "there discussed. And wrongs no doubt there were, 
under which Scotland was suffering, ever since the Union had 
destroyed not only her nationality, but almost her political ex- 
istence. The franchise had become very close — in the counties 
restricted to a few of the chief families — in the boroughs thrown 
into the hands of the Bailies, who were venal beyond conception. 
It was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent member of 
the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an autocrat, and as 
the dispenser of all her patronage. A patriotic autocrat no doubt, 
loving his country, and providing well for those of her people whom 
he favoured— still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has 
been pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, 
by Lord Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whig- 
gery, in which they and their friends should figure as heroes and 
martyrs. But whatever may be said against Dundas's regime as 
a permanent system, it must be allowed that this was no time to 
remodel it when England was face to face with the French troubles. 
When the tempest is breaking over the ship, the captain may 
reasonably be excused for thinking that the moment would be ill 
chosen for renewing cordage or repairing timbers. Whatever may 
have been right in a time of quiet, it was not unnatural that the Pitt 
administration should postpone all thoughts of reform, till the vessel 
of the State had weathered the storm which was then upon her. 

Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be reddresse, 
Burns had, he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, 
as is so often seen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great 
powers, which he believed entitled him to a very different position, 
were unacknowledged and disregarded by the then dispensers of 
patronage. Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, lately he could 
not bear the mention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, 
we have seen, was fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims 
on Pitt, who himself was quite awake to the charms of Burns's 
poetry. The Premier, it is said, >v pushed the bottle on to Dundas, 
and did nothing " — to Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to 
waste a thought on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him 
by public men preyed on the spirit of Burns, and was seldom 
absent from his thoughts. It added force, no doubt, to the rapture 
with which he, like all the younger poets of the time, hailed the 
French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day, which would 
place plebeian genius and worth in those high places, whence 
titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at length thrust 
ignominiously down. 

Burns had not been more than three months in Dumfries, be- 
fore he found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy 
with the French Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of 
the Solway swarmed with smuggling vessels, carrying on a contra- 
band traffic, and manned by men of reckless character, like the 
Dirk Hatteraick of Guy Mannering. In 1792, a suspicious-looking 
brig appeared in the Solway, and Burns, with other excisemen, 



9 2 



BURA r S. 



was set to watch her motions. She got into shallow water, when 
the gaugers, enforced by some dragoons, waded out to her, and 
Burns, sword in hand, ^was the first to board her. The captured 
brig " Rosamond," with ail her arms and stores, was sold next day 
at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns. 
These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assembly, 
requesting them to accept the present as a mark of his admiration 
and sympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their 
destination. They were, however, intercepted by the Custom- 
house officers at Dover, and Burns at once became a suspected 
man in the eye of the Government. Lockhart, who tells this 
incident, connects with it the song, The DeiPs awa? ivP the Excise- 
man, which Burns, he said, composed while waiting on the shore to 
watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubts whether the song 
is referable to this occasion. However this may be, the folly of 
Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He was in the employ of 
Government, and had no right to express in this way his sympathy 
with a movement which, he must have known, the Government, 
under whom he served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at 
least with jealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their 
personal right and public duty unreservedly to express, by word 
and deed, their views on 'politics, had better not seek employment 
in the public service. Burns having once drawn upon himself the 
suspicions of his superiors, all his words and actions were no doubt 
closely watched. It was found that he "gat the Gazetteer," a 
revolutionary print published in Edinburgh, which only the most 
extreme men patronised, and which after a few months' existence 
was suppressed by Government. As the year i792drewtoa close, 
the political heaven, both at home and abroad, became ominously 
dark. In Paris the king was in prison, the Reign of Terror had 
begun, and innocent blood of loyalists flowed freely in the streets ; 
the republic which had been established was threatening to prop- 
agate its principles in other countries by force of arms. In this 
country, what at the beginning of the year had been but suspicion 
of France, was now turned to avowed hostility, and war against 
the republic was on the eve of being declared. There were uneasy 
symptoms, too, at home. Tom Paine's Rights of Man and Age of 
Reason were spreading questionable doctrines and fomenting dis- 
affection. Societies named Friends of the People were formed 
in Edinburgh and the chief towns of Scotland, to demand reform 
of the representation and other changes, which, made at such a 
time, were believed by those in power to cover seditious aims. 
At such a crisis any government might be expected to see that 
all its officers, from the highest to the lowest, were well affected. 
But though the Reign of Terror had alarmed many others who had 
at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France, Burns's 
ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even denounced the 
war on which the ministry had determined ; he openly reviled the 
men in power ; and went so far in his avowal of democracy that at 
a social meeting, he proposed as a toast, " Here's the last verse of 



BURNS. 



93 



the last chapter of the last Book of Kings." This would seem to be 
but one specimen of the freedom of political speech in which 
Burns at this time habitually indulged — the truculent way in which 
he flaunted defiance in the face of authority. It would not have 
been surprising if at any time the Government had ordered in- 
quiry to be made into such conduct, much less in such a season of 
anxiety and distrust. That an inquiry was made is undoubted ; 
but as to the result which followed it, there is uncertainty. Some 
have thought that the poet received from his superiors only a 
slight hint or caution to be more careful in future. Others be- 
lieved, that the matter went so far that he was in serious danger 
of dismissal from his post; and that this was only averted by the 
timely interposition of some kind and powerful friends. That 
Burns himself took a serious view of it, and was sufficiently ex- 
cited and alarmed, may be seen from two letters which he wrote, 
the one at the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It 
was thus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham of 
Fintray, the same person whose good offices had at first obtained 
for the poet his appointment, and whose kindness never failed 
him while he lived : 

"Sir, — I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted by 
Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order 
from your Board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming 
me as a person disaffected to Government. 

" Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you 
would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your 
helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded 
and disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable 
and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a 
miserable existence. 

"Alas 1 sir, must I think that such soon will be mv lot! and 
from the dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy, too ! I be- 
lieve, sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I 
would not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse 
horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over 
my head ; and I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made 
it, is a lie ! To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, 
next after my God, I am most devoutly attached. You, sir, have 
been much and generously my friend. — Heaven knows how warmly 
I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked vou. 
Fortune, sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent — has given 
you patronage, and me dependence. I would not, for my single 
self, call on your humanity ; were such my insular, unconnected 
situation. I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye. I 
would brave misfortune — I could face ruin, for at the worst Death's 
thousand doors stand open : but — the tender concerns that I have 
mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel 
around me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution ! To 
your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a 
claim ; and your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To 



94 



BURNS. 



these sir, permit me to appeal ; by these may I adjure you to save 
me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and which 
• — with my latest breath I will say it — I have not deserved. 

"R.B." 

That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a 
letter on this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 
'793? to Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the super- 
visors-general, a Mr. Corbet, "was instructed to inquire on the 
spot, and to document me that my business was to act, not to think : 
and that, whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to 
be silent and obedient.' 1 ' 1 

Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board — but 
on what grounds of justice I have never been able to discover — for 
the way in which they on this occasion dealt with Burns. The 
members of the Board were the servants of the Government, to 
which they were responsible for the conduct of all their subordi- 
nates. To have allowed any of their subordinates to set themselves 
up by word or deed in opposition to the Ministry, and especially 
at such a crisis, was inconsistent with the ideas of the time as to 
official duty. And when called on to act, it is hard to see how they 
could have done so with more leniency than by hinting to him the 
remonstrance which so alarmed and irritated the recipient of it. 
Whatever may be said of his alarm, his irritation, if perhaps natural, 
was not reasonable. No man has a right to expect that, because 
he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of conduct, 
either in private or in public life, which are held binding on his 
more commonplace brethren. About the time when he received 
this rebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, " I have set, henceforth, a 
seal on my lips as to these unlucky politics." But neither his own 
resolve nor the remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have 
weighed much with him. He continued at convivial parties to ex- 
press his feelings freely; and atone of these, shortly after he had 
been rebuked by the Excise Board, when the health of William 
Pitt was drunk, he followed it by craving a bumper " to the health 
of a much better man — General Washington." And on a subse- 
quent occasion, as we shall see, he brought himself into trouble by 
giving an injudicious toast. The repression brought to bear on 
Burns cannot have been very stringent when he was still free to 
sport such sentiments. The worst effect of the remonstrance he 
received seems to have been to irritate his temper, and to depress 
his spirits by the conviction, unfounded though it was, that all hope 
of promotion for him was over." 

But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his conduct, domes- 
tic, social, and political, the chief refuge and solace which lie found 
was in exercising his gifts of song. All hope of his ever achieving 
a great poem, which called for sustained effort, was now over. 
Even poems descriptive of rustic life and characters, such as he 
had sketched in his Ayrshire days — for these he had now no longer 
either time or inclination. His busy and distracted life, however, 



BURNS. 95 

left him leisure from time to time to give vent to his impulses, or 
to soothe his feelings by short arrow-flights of song. He found in 
his own experience the truth of those words of another poet — 

" They can make who fail to find 
Short leisure even in busiest days, 
Moments to cast a look behind, 
And profit bv those kfcdly rays 
Which through the clouds will sometimes steal, 
And all the far-off past reveal." 

Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and turned 
every golden gleam to song. _ "• . 

It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edinburgh he 
became acquainted with James Johnson, who was engaged in col- 
lecting the songs of Scotland in a work called the Musical Museum* 
He had at once thrown himself ardently into Johnson's undertaking, 
and put all his power of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of 
original composition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued to 
dolhrough all the Ellisland period, and more or less during his 
residence in Dumfries. To the Museum Burns from first to last 
gratuitously contributed not less than one hundred and eighty-four 
songs, original, altered, or collected. 

During the first year that Burns lived in Dumfries, in Sep- 
tember, 1792, he received an invitation from Mr. George Thomson 
to lend the aid of his lyrical genius to a collection of Scottish melo- 
dies, airs, and words, which a small band of musical amateurs in 
Edinburgh were then projecting. This collection was pitched to a 
higher key than the comparatively humble Museum. It was to be 
edited with more rigid care, the symphonies and accompaniments 
were to be supplied by the first musicians of Europe, and it was 
to be expurgated from all leaven of coarseness, and from whatever 
could offend the purest taste. To Thomson's proposal Burns at 
once replied, "As the request vou make to me will positively add 
to my enjoyment in complying with it, I shall enter into your under- 
taking with all the small portion of abilities I have, strained to their 
utmost exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm. . . . 

" If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end 
of tlu matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad, or the 
pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being al- 
lowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue. ... As to remu- 
neration, you may think my songs either above or below price ; for 
they shall be absolutely the one or the other. In the honest en- 
thusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, 
wages, fee, hire, Sec., would be downright prostitution of soul." 

In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thomson 
opened before him, and in this spirit he worked at it to the last, 
pouring forth song after song almost to his latest breath Hardly 
less interesting than the songs themselves, which from time to time 
he sent to Thomson, were the letters with which he accompanied 
them. In these his judgment and critical power are as conspicuous 



96 BURNS, 

as his genius and his enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all 
who take interest in songs and in the laws which govern their move- 
ment, I know not where else they would find hints so valuable as 
in these occasional remarks on his own and others' songs, by the 
greatest lyric singer whom the modern world has seen. 

The bard who furnished the English songs for this collection 
was a certain Dr. Wolcot, known fts Peter Pindar. This poetiser, 
who seems to have been wholly devoid of genius, but to have pos- 
sessed a certain talent for hitting the taste of the hour, was then 
held in high esteem ; he has long since been forgotten. Even 
Burns speaks of him with much respect. " The very name of 
Peter Pirydar is an acquisition to your work," he writes to Thom- 
son. Well might Chambers say, " It is a humiliating thought that 
Peter Pindar was richly pensioned by the booksellers, while Burns, 
the true sweet singer, lived in comparative poverty." Hard meas- 
ure has been dealt to Thomson for not having liberally remunerated 
Burns for the priceless treasures which he supplied to the Collec- 
tion. Chambers and others, who have thoroughly examined the 
whole matter, have shown this censure to be undeserved. Thom- 
son himself was by no means rich, and his work brought him noth- 
ing but outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 1793, 
"when Thomson had sent Burns some money in return for his songs, 
the bard then replied : 

" I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your 
pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to 
return it would savour of affectation ; but, as to any more traffic of 
that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that honour which crowns 
the upright statue oiRobSrt Burns' 1 s Integrity, on the least motion 
of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from that 
moment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's character for 
generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long 
outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; 
at least I will take care that such a character he shall deserve." 

This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be deemed 
Quixotic, when we remember that for his poems Burns was quite 
willing to accept all that Creech would offer. Yet one cannot but 
honour it. He felt that both Johnson and Thomson was enthu- 
siasts, labouring to embalm in a permanent form their country's 
minstrelsy, and that they were doing this without any hope of profit. 
He too would bear his part in the noble work ; if he had not in 
other respects done full justice to his great gifts, in this way he 
would repay some of the debt he owed to his country, bv throwing 
into her national melodies the whole wealth and glory of his genius. 
And this he would do, "all for love, and nothing for reward " And 
the continual effort to do this worthily was the chief relaxation and 
delight of those sad later years. When he died, he had contributed 
to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of these only six had then ap- 
peared, as only one half-volume of Thomson's work had then been 
published. Burns had given Thomson the copyright of all the 
sixty songs ; but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet's 



BUKiVS. g7 

works was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the poet'S 
family, to be included in the forthcoming edition, along with the 
interesting letters which had accompanied the songs. Thomson's 
collection was not completed till 1S41, when the sixth and last vol- 
ume of it appeared. It is affecting to know that Thomson himself, 
who was older than Burns by two years, survived him for more than 
five-and-fifty, and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age of 
ninety-four. 



9 8 SUHNS. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LAST YEARS. 

DURING those Dumfries years little is to be done by the biog- 
rapher but to trace the several incidents in Burns's quarrel with the 
world, his growing exasperation, and the evil effects of it on his 
conduct and his fortunes. It is a painful record, but since it must 
be given, it shall be with as much brevity as is consistent with 
truth. 

In July, 1793, Burns made an excursion into Galloway, accom- 
panied by a Mr. Syme, who belonging, like himself, to the Excise, 
admired the poet, and agreed with his politics. Syme has pre- 
served a record of this journey, and the main impression left by the 
perusal of it is the strange access of ill-temper which had come 
over Burns, who kept venting his spleen in epigrams on all whom 
he disliked, high and low. They visited Kenmure, where lived 
Mr. Gordon, the representative of the old Lords Kenmure. They 
passed thence over the muirs to Gatehouse, in a wild storm, during 
which Burns was silent, and crooning to himself what, Syme says, 
was the first thought of Scots wha has. They were engaged to go 
to St. Mary's Isle, the seat of the Earl of Selkirk ; but Burns was in 
such a savage mood against all lords, that he was with difficulty 
persuaded to go thither, though Lord Selkirk was no Tory, but a 
Whig, like himself, and the father of his old friend, Lord Daer, by 
this time deceased, who had first convinced him that a lord might 
possibly be an honest and kind-hearted man. When they were 
once under the hospitable ro»f of St. Mary's Isle, the kindness 
with which they were received appeased the poet's bitterness. 
The Earl was benign, the young ladies were beautiful, and two 
of them sang Scottish songs charmingly. Urbani, an Italian mu- 
sician who had edited Scotch music, was there, and sang many 
Scottish melodies, accompanying them with instrumental music. 
Burns recited some of his songs amid the deep silence that is 
most expressive of admiration. The evening passed very pleas- 
antly, and the lion of the morning had, ere the evening was over, 
melted to a lamb. 

Scots wha has has been mentioned. Mr. Syme tells us that it 
was composed partly while Burns was riding in a storm between 
Gatehouse and Kenmure, and partly on the second morning after 
this, when they were journeying from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. 
And Mr. Syme adds that next day the poet presented him with 



BURNS. 



99 



one copy of the poem for himself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. 
Mr. Carlyle says, M This Dithyrambic was composed on horseback; 
in riding in die middle of tempests over the wildest Galloway moor, 
in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the }x>et's looks, for- 
bore to speak — judiciously enough — -for a man composing Bruce's 
address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn 
was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns, but 
to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirl- 
wind." 

Burns however, in a letter to Mr. Thomson, dated September, 
1 793, gives an account of the composition of his war-ode, which is 
difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's statement. " There is a tradi- 
tion which I have met with in many places in Scotland," he writes, 
" that the old air, Hey, tuitie taitie, was Robert Bruce's inarch at 
the battle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my yesternight's 
evening walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of 
liberty and independence, which I threw into a kind, of Scottish 
ode, fitted to the air, that one might suppose to be the gallant royal 
Scot's address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning." 
He adds that " the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle 
for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles 
of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania." 
So Bruce's Address owes its inspiration as much to Burns's sym- 
pathy with the French Republicans as to his Scottish patriotism. 
As to the intrinsic merit of the ode itself, Mr. Carlyle says, '' So 
long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchmen or man, it 
will move in fierce-thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, 
that was ever written by any pen." To this verdict every son of* 
Scottish soil is, I suppose, bound to say Amen. It ought not, how- 
ever, to be concealed that there has been a very different estimate 
formed of it by judges sufficiently competent. I remember to have 
read somewhere of a conversation between Wordsworth and Mrs. 
Hemans, in which they both agreed that the famous ode was not 
much more than a commonplace piece of school-boy rhodomontade 
about liberty. Probably it does owe not a little of its power 
to the music to which it is sung, and to the associations which 
have gathered round it. The enthusiasm for French Revo- 
lution sentiments, which may have been in Burns's mind when 
composing it, has had nothing to do with the delight with which 
thousands since have sung and listened to it. The poet, however, 
when he first conceived it, was no doubt raging inwardly, like a 
lion, not only caged, but muzzled with the gag of his servitude to 
Government. But for this, what diatribes in favour of the Revolution 
might we not have had, and what pain must it have been to Burns 
to suppress these under the coercion of external authority ! Partly 
to this feeling, as well as to other causes, may be ascribed such 
outbursts as the following, written to a female correspondent, im- 
mediately after his return from the Galloway tour : 

" There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, 
so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative 



ioo BURNS. 

view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suf. 
fer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, 
give him a stronger imagination, and a more delicate sensibility, 
which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of 
passions than are the usual lot of man : implant in him an irrestitible 
impulse to some idle vagary, ... in short, send him after some 
pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, 
and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the 
pleasures that lucre can purchase ; lastly, fill up the measure of his 
woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity — 
and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet." This 
passage will recall to many the catalogue of sore evils to which 
poets are by their temperament exposed, which Wordsworth in his 
Leech-gatherer enumerates. 

" The fear that kills, 
And hope that is unwilling to be fed; 
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills 
And mighty poets in their misery dead." 

In writing that poem Wordsworth had Burns among others 
prominently in his eye. W,hat a commentary is the life of the 
more impulsive poet on the lines of his younger and more self-con- 
trolling brother ! During those years of political unrest and of 
growing mental disquiet, his chief solace was, as I have said, to 
compose songs for Thomson's Collection, into which he poured a 
continual supply. Indeed it is wonderful how often he was able to 
escape from his own vexations into that serener atmosphere, and 
there to suit melodies and moods most alien to his own with fitting 
words. 

Here in one of his letters to Thomson is the way he describes 
himself in the act of composition. " My way is — I consider the 
poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expres- 
sion ; then choose my theme ; begin one stanza ; when that is com- 
posed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I 
walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around 
me that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy 
and workings of my bosom ; humming every now and then the air 
with the verses I have framed. When I feel my Muse beginning 
to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there com- 
mit my effusions to paper ; swinging at intervals on the hind legs 
of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures 
as my pen goes on." To this may be added what Allan Cunning- 
ham tells us. " While he lived in Dumfries he had three favourite 
walks — on the Dock-green by the river-side ; among the ruins of 
Lincluden College; and towards the Martingdon-ford, on the north 
side of the Nith. This latter place was secluded, commanded a 
view of the distant hills and the romantic towers of Lincluden, and 
afforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, within sight and sound 
of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself, his 
wife saw that he had something in his mind, and was prepared to 



BURNS. 1 01 

see him snatch up his hat, and set silently off for his musing-ground. 
When by himself, and in the open air, his ideas arranged themselves 
in their natural order — words came at will, and he seldom returned 
without having finished a song. . . . When the verses were finished, 
he passed them through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice, listened 
attentively when she sang ; asked her if any of the words were diffi- 
cult ; and when one happened to be too rough, he readily found 
a smoother; but he never, save at the resolute entreaty of a sci- 
entific musician, sacrificed sense to sound. The autumn was his 
favourite season, and the twilight his favourite hour of study." 

Regret has often been expressed that Burns spent so much time 
and thought on writing his songs, and, in this way, diverted his en- 
ergies from higher aims. Sir Walter has said, " Notwithstanding 
the spirit of many of his lyrics, and the exqusite sweetness and sim- 
plicity of others, we cannot but deeply regret that so much of his 
time and talents was frittered away in compiling and composing for 
musical collections. There is sufficient evidence that even the 
genius of Burns could not support him in the monotonous task of 
writing love-verses, on heaving bosoms and sparkling eyes, and 
twisting them into such rhythmical forms as might suit the capri- 
cious evolutions of Scotch reels and strathspeys." Even if Burns, 
instead of continual song-writing during the last eight years of his 
life, had concentrated his strength on " his grand plan of a dramatic 
composition " on the subject of Bruce's adventures, it may be 
doubted whether he would have done so much to enrich his coun- 
try's literature as he has done by the songs he composed. But 
considering how desultory his habits became, if Johnson and Thom- 
son had not, as it were, set him a congenial task, he might not have 
produced anything at all during those years. There is, however, 
another aspect in which the continual composition of love ditties 
must be regretted. The few genuine love-songs, straight from the 
heart, which he composed, such as Of a 1 the Airts, To Mary in 
Heaven, Ye Banks and Braes, can hardly be too highly prized. 
But there are many others, which arose from a lower and'fictitious 
source of inspiration. He himself tells Thomson that when he 
wished to compose a love-song, his recipe was to put himself on a 
"regimen of admiring a beautiful woman." This was a dangerous 
regimen, and when it came to be often repeated, as it was, it can- 
not have tended to his peace of heart, or to the purity of his 
life. 

The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually unhappy 
time with Burns. It was almost entirely songless. Instead of 
poetry, we hear of political dissatisfaction, excessive drinking- 
bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This was the time when our 
country was at war with the French Republic — a war which Burns 
bitterly disliked, but his employment underGovernment forced him 
to set "a seal on his lips as to those unlucky politics." A regi- 
ment of soldiers was quartered in the town of" Dumfries, and to 
Burns's eye the sight of their red coats was so offensive, that he 
would not go down the plainstones lest he should meet "the epau« 



102 BURNS. 

letted puppies," who thronged the street. One of those epauletted 
puppies, whom he so disliked, found occasion to pull Burns up 
rather smartly* The poet, when in his cups, had in the hearing of 
a certain captain proposed as a toast, " May our success in the 
present war be equal to the justice of our cause." The soldier 
called him to account — a duel seemed imminent, and Burns had next 
day to write an apologetic letter, in order to avoid the risk of ruin. 
About the same time he was involved, through intemperance, in 
another and more painful quarrel. It has been already noticed 
that at Woodley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Rid- 
del, who was both beautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of 
poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont to press 
his guests to deeper potations than were usual even in those hard- 
drinking days. One evening, when the guests had sat till they 
were inflamed with wine, they entered the drawing-room, and Burns 
in some way grossly insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote 
a letter of the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, how- 
ever, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think fit to accept. Stung by 
this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the opposite extreme of feel- 
ing, and penned a grossly scurrilous monody on •' a lady famed for 
her caprice." This he followed up by other lampoons, lull of 
" coarse rancour against a lady who had showed him many kind- 
nesses." The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturally sided 
with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend of Ellisland. 
While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars Carse, died in the 
spring-time, and the poet, remembering his friend's worth and 
former kindness, wrote a sonnet over him — not one of his best or 
most natural performances, yet showing the return of his better 
heart. During the same spring we hear of Burns agoing to the house 
of one of the neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with the 
rest of the party, but his own choice, it would seem, with the house- 
keeper in her room, and joining the gentlemen in the dining-room 
after the ladies had retired. He was now, it seems, more disliked 
by ladies than by men — a change since those Edinburgh days, when 
the highest dames of the land had spoken so rapturously of the 
charm of his conversation. 

Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (1791), Burns turned to 
his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunningham, and poured 
forth this passionate and well-known complaint : — " Canst thou 
minister to a mind diseased ? Canst thou speak peace and rest to 
a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to 
guide her course, and dreading that the next sursje may overwhelm 
her? Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecu- 
niary share in the ruin of these cursed times — losses which, though 
trifling, were what I could ill bear — have so irritated me. that my 
feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listen- 
ing to the sentence that dooms it to perdition. — Are you deep in 
the language of consolation ? I have exhausted in reflection every 
topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with 
my sentiments and reasonings ; but as to myself, I was like Judas 



BURNS. 



103 



Iscariot preaching the Gospel. . . . Still there are two great pil- 
lars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. 
The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in 
man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. 
The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, how- 
ever the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure 
them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the 
human soul, those senses of the mind — if I maybe allowed the ex- 
pression — which connect us with and link us to those awful obscure 
realities— an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world 
to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of 
combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field : the last pours the 
balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure." 

This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter, was 
written on February 25, 1794. It was probably a few months later, 
perhaps in May of the same year, while Burns was still under this de- 
pression, that there occurred an affecting incident, which has been 
preserved by Lockhart. Mr. David McCuIloch, of Ardweib fold 
Lockhart, li that he was seldom more grieved than when, riding 
into Dumfries one fine summer's evening, to attend a country ball, 
he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal 
street of the town, while the opposite part was gay with successive 
groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festi- 
vities of the night, not one of whom seemed willing to recognise 
the poet. The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on 
his proposing to him to cross the street, said. ' Nay, nay, my young 
friend, that's all t>ver now ;' and quoted, after a pause, some verses 
of Lady Grizzell Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

"' His bonnet stood ance fu' fair 011 his brow. 

His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new; 
But- now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon thecorn-bing. 

" * O, were we voung, as we ance hae been. 

We suld hac ix;en galloping clown on yon green, 
And linking it owre the lily-white lee — 
And werena my heart light, I wad die.' " 

"Tt was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain 
subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing these 
verses assumed the sprightliness of his mostpleasing manner: and 
taking his friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably 
until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, 
and Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he had recently 
composed." 

In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the earliest 
hint that he felt his health declining. " I am afraid." he says, 
" that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medi- 
cal friends threaten me with flying gout ; but I trust they are mis- 
taken." And again, a few months later, we find him, when writing 



io4 



BUfiNS. 



to tiie same friend, recurring to the same apprehensions. Vexation 
and disappointment within, and excesses, if not continual, yet too 
frequent, from without, had for long been undermining his natu- 
rally strong but nervously sensitive frame, and those symptoms were 
now making themselves felt, which were soon to lay him in an early 
grave. As the autumn drew on, his singing powers revived, and 
till the close of the year he kept pouring into Thomson a stream of 
songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly one without a touch 
such as only the genuine singer can give. 

The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies his 
gifts, are full of suggestive thoughts on song, hints most precious to 
all who care for such matters. For the forgotten singers of his 
native land he is full of sympathy. " By the way," he writes to 
Thomson, " are you not vexed to think that those men of genius, 
for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, 
should be unknown ? " 

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love-ditties ; 
but when the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of 
which kind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as 
good songs on other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, 
the one in November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to 
the latter order, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their 
excellence as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's mood of 
mind at the time when he composed them. 

The first is this — 

" Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair, 
Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, 
I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, 
Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang 

" I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought ; 
But man is a soger, arid life is a faught : 
My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch, 
And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch. 

" A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa', 
A night o' gude fellowship southers it a' ; 
When at the blythe end o' our journev at last, 
Wha the deil ever thinks o : the road he has past ? 

" Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way ; 
Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae : 
Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain, 
My warst word is — Welcome, and welcome again." 

This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his struggle 
with the world, when he could look on both from the placid, rather 
than the despondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of 
himself; for, when a good miniature of him had been done, he 
wrote to Thomson that he wished a vignette from it to be prefixed 
to this song, that, in his own words, " the portrait of my face aad 



BURNS. 



io 5 



the picture of my mind may go down the stream of time together," 
Burns had more moods of mind than most men, and this was, we 
may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But if we would reach the 
truth, we probably ought to strike a balance between the spirit of 
this song and the dark moods depicted in some of those letters 
already quoted. 

The other song of the same time is the well-known A Afan's a 
Man for a' that. This powerful song speaks out in his best style 
a sentiment that through all his life had been dear to the heart of 
Burns. It has been quoted, they say, by Beranger in France, and 
by Goethe in Germany, and is the word which springs up in the 
mind of all foreigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, 
no doubt, by his keen sense of social oppression, quickened to 
white heat by influences that had lately come from France, and by 
what he had suffered for his sympathy with that cause. It has 
since become the watchword of all who fancy that they have se- 
cured less, and others more, of this world's goods than their re- 
spective merit deserves. Stronger words he never wrote. 

" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have been wished 
that so noble a song had not been marred by any touch of social 
bitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be a "birkie" and a '• coof," 
but may not a ploughman be so too ? This great song Burns wrote 
on the first day of 1795. 

Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, the panic 
which had filled the land in 1792, from the doings of the French 
republicans, and their sympathisers in this country, began to abate ; 
and the blast of Government displeasure, which for a time had 
beaten heavily on Burns, seemed to have blown over. He writes 
to Mrs. Dunlop on the 29th of December, 1794, " My political sins 
seem to be forgiven me ; " and as a proof of it he mentions 
that during the illness of his superior officer, he had been ap- 
pointed to act as supervisor — a duty which he discharged for about 
two months. In the same letter he sends to that good lady his 
usual kindly greeting for the coming year, and concludes thus : — 
" What a transient business is life ! Very lately I was a boy ; but 
t' other day I was a young man ; and I already begin to feel the 
rigid fib r e and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o'er my 
frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of 
manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, 
religion strongly impressed on my mind." Burns always keeps his 
most serious thoughts for this good lady- Herself religious, she 
no doubt tried to keep the truths of religion before the poet's mind. 
And he naturally was drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved 
than when he wrote to most others. 

In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as supervisor 
led him to what he describes as the '•' unfortunate, wicked little vil- 
lage " of Ecclefechan, in Annandale. The night after he arrived, 



106 BURNS. 

there fell the heaviest snow-storm known in Scotland within living 
memory. When people awoke next morning they found the snow 
up to the windows of the second story of their houses. In the hol- 
low of Campsie hills it lay to the depth of from eighty to a hundred 
feet, and it had not disappeared from the streets of Edinburgh on 
the king's birthday, the 4th of June. Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, 
Burns indulged in deep potations and in song-writing. Probably 
he imputed to the place that with which his own conscience re- 
proached himself. Currie. who was a native of Ecclefechan, much 
offended, says, "The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abuse 
sweet Ecclefechan at this rate." It was also the birthplace of the 
poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of De- 
cember in the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas 
Carlyle was born in that village. Shortly after his visit, the poet 
beat his brains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into 
a song. 

In March of the same year we find him again joining in local 
politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron of Heron, 
the Whig candidate for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, against the 
nominee of the Earl of Galloway, against whom and his family 
Burns seems to have harboured some peculiar enmitv. 

Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him about his 
own prospects : — " The moment I am appointed supervisor, in the 
common routine I may be nominated on the collectors' list ; and 
this is always a business of purely political patronage. A collector- 
ship varies much, from better than 200/. to near icoo/. a year. A 
life of literary leisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of 
my wishes." 

The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. It 
required some years for its realisation, and the years allotted to 
Burns were now nearly numbered. The prospect which he here 
dwells on may, however, have helped to lighten his mental gloom 
during the last year of his life. For one year of activity there cer- 
tainly was, between the time when the cloud of political displeasure 
against him disappeared towards the end of 1794, and the time when 
his health finally gave way in the autumn of 1795, during which, to 
judge by his letters, he indulged much less in outbursts of social 
discontent. One proof of this is seen in the following fact. In the 
spring of 1795, a volunteer-corps was raised in Dumfries, to defend 
the country, while the regular army was engaged abroad, in war 
with France. Many of the Dumfries Whigs, and among them 
Burns's friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the 
corps, in order to prove their loyalty and patriotism, on which some 
suspicions had previously been cast. Burns too offered himself, 
and was received into the corps. Allan Cunningham remembered 
the appearance of the regiment, " their odd but not ungraceful 
dress ; white kerseymere breeches and waistcoat ; short blue coat, 
faced with red ; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the 
helmets of the Horse Guards." He remembered the poet too, as he 
showed among them, "his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, 



BURNS. 107 

his large dark eyes, and his awkwardness in handling his arms." 
But if he could not handle his musket deftly, he could do what none 
else in that or any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave 
which thrilled the hearts not only of his comrades, but every Briton 
from Land's End to Johny Groat's. 
This is one of the verses : — 

" The kettle o' the kirk and state 

Perhaps a clout may fall in't ; 
But deil a foreign tinkler loun 

Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
Our fathers' blude the kettle bought, 

And wha wad dare to spoil it ? 
By heavens! the sacrilegious dog 

Shalt fuel be to boil it! 
By heavens ! the sacrilegious dog 

Shall fuel be to boil it ! " 

This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the country, 
people everywhere, and is said to have done much to change the 
feelings of those who were disaffected. Much blame has been 
cast upon the Tory Ministry, then in power, for not having offered 
a pension to Burns. It was not, it is said, that they did not know 
of him, or that they disregarded his existence. For Mr. Adding- 
ton, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his ge- 
nius, acknowledged it in verse, and is said to have urged his claims 
upon the Government. Mr. Pitt, soon after the poet's death, is 
reported to have said of Burns's poetry, at the table of Lord Liver- 
pool, " I can think of no verse since Shakespeare's that has so much 
the appearance of coming sweetly from nature." It is on Mr. 
Dundas, however, at that time one of the Ministry, and the auto- 
crat of all Scottish affairs, that the heaviest weight of blame has 
fallen. But perhaps this is not altogether deserved. There is the 
greatest difference between a literary man, who holds his political 
opinions in private, but refrains from mingling in party politics, and 
one who zealously espouses one side, and employs his literary 
power in promoting it. He threw himself into every electioneer- 
ing business with his whole heart, wrote, while he might have been 
better employed, electioneering ballads of little merit, in which he 
lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, often scurrilouslv, 
the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would have been magnani- 
mous in the men then in power to have overlooked all these things, 
and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry of Burns. 
And it were to be wished that such magnanimity were more com- 
mon among public men. But we do not see it practised even at 
the present clay, any more than it was in the time of Burns. 

During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with his 
accustomed duties, and, during the intervals of business, kept send- 
ing to Thomson the songs he from time to time composed. 

His professional prospects seemed at this time to be brighten- 
ing, for about the middle of May, 1795, his staunch friend, Mr. 
Graham, of Fintray, would seem to have revived an earlier project 



I08 BUKiVS. 

of having him transferred to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an 
income of nearly 200/. a year. This project could not at the time be 
carried out ; but that it should have been thought of proves that 
political offences of the past were beginning to be forgotten. Dur- 
ing this same year there were symptoms that the respectable per- 
sons who had for some time frowned on him were willing to relent. 
A combination of causes, his politics, the Riddel quarrel, and his 
own many imprudences, had kept him under a cloud. And this 
disfavour of the well-to-do had not increased his self-respect or 
made him more careful about the company he kept. Disgust with 
the world had made him reckless and defiant. But with the open- 
ing of 1795, the Riddels were reconciled to him, and received him 
once more into their good graces ; and others, their friends, prob- 
ably followed their example. 

But the time was drawing near when the smiles or the frowns 
of the Dumfries magnates would be alike indifferent to him. 
There has been more than enough of discussion among the 
biographers of Burns as to how far he really deteriorated in him- 
self during those Dumfries years, as to the extent and the causes 
of the social discredit into which he fell, and as to the charge that 
he took to low company. His early biographers — Currie, Walker, 
Heron — drew the picture somewhat darkly ; Lockhart and Cunning- 
ham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the shadows. Cham- 
bers has laboured to give the facts impartially, has faithfully placed 
the lights and the shadows side by side, and has summed up the 
whole subject in an appendix on The Reputation of Burns in his 
Later Years, to which I would refer any who desire to See this 
painful subject minutely handled. Whateve r extenuations or ex- 
cuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries 
was on the whole a downward one, and must concur, however re- 
luctantlv, in the conclusion at which Lockhart, while decrying the 
severe judgments of Currie, Heron, and others, is forced by truth 
to come, that " the untimely death of Burns was, it is too probable, 
hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences." To inquire 
minutely, what was the extent of those intemperances, and what 
the nature of those imprudences, is a subject which can little profit 
any one, and on which one has no heart to enter. If the general 
statement of fact be true, the minute details are better left to the 
kindlv oblivion, which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this 
time have overtaken them. 

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been — deeply 
disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, however, there were 
who took a more lenient view of him. Findlater. his superior in the 
Excise, used to assert that no officer under him was more regular 
in his public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, 
has left it on record, that no parent he knew watched more care- 
fully over his children's education — that he had often found the 
poet in his home explaining to his eldest boy passages of the Eng- 
lish poets from Shakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the 
father's instructions was apparent in the excellence of the son's 



BURNS. IO o 

daily school performances. This brighter side of the picture, how- 
ever, is not irreconciliable with that darker one. For Burns's 
whole character was a compound of the most discordant and con- 
tradictory elements. Dr. Chambers has well shown that he who 
at one hour was the douce sober Mr. Burns, in the next was 
changed to the maddest of Bacchanals : now he was glowing with 
the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the very opposite 
extreme. 

One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a distance 
would seem to have been by Professor Walker, although the date 
of it is somewhat uncertain. Eight years had passed since the 
Professor had parted with Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet's 
happy visit there. In the account which the Professor has left of 
his two days' interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of 
disappointment with the change which the intervening years had 
wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged residence in England 
had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with 
rusticity and coarseness. However this may be, he found Burns, 
as he thought, not improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his 
potations, more coarse and gross in his talk, than when he had 
formerly known him. 

For some time past there had not been wanting symptoms to 
show that the poet's strength was already past its prime. In June, 

1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. Dunlop that he had been 
in poor health, and was afraid he was beginning to suffer for the 
follies of his youth. His physicians threatened him, he said, with 
flying gout, but he trusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 

1795, he said to one who called on him, that he was beginning to 
feel as if he were soon to be an old man. Still he went about all 
his usual employments. But during the latter part of that year his 
health seems to have suddenly declined. For some considerable 
time he was confined to a sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to 
be well informed, states that this illness lasted from October, 1795, 
till the following January. No details of his malady are given, and 
little more is known of his condition at this time, except what 
he himself has given in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, and in a rhymed 
epistle to one of his brother Excisemen. 

At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing to his 
prolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else he would not 
have penned to his friend, Collector Mitcnell, the following re- 
quest : 

" Friend of the Poet, tried and leal, 
Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal ; 
Alake, alake, the meikle deil 
Wi' a' his witches 
Are at it, skelpin' ! jig and reel, 
In my poor pouches. 

" I modestly fu fain wad hint it, 
That one pound one, I sairly want it ; 
If wi' the hizzie down ye sent it, 



1IO BURNS. 

It would be kind ; 

And while my heart wi' life-blood dunted, 

I'd bear't in mind. 

***** 

" POSTSCRIPT. 

" Ye've heard this while how I've been licker 
And by fell death was nearly nicket : 
Grim loun ! he gat me by the fecket, 

And sair me sheuk ; 
But by gude luck I lap a wicket, 

And turn'd a neuk. 

"But by that health, I've got a share o't, 
And by that life, I'm promised mair o't, 
My heal and weel I'll take a care o't 

A tentier way : 
Then fareweel, folly, hide and hair o't, 
For ance and aye." 

It was, alas ! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even if he 
could have done so indeed. With the opening of the year 1796 he 
somewhat revived, and the prudent resolve of his sickness disap- 
peared with the first prospect of returning health. Chambers thus 
records a fact which the local tradition of Dumfries confirms : — 
" Earlv in the month of January, when his health was in the course 
of improvement, Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party in the 
Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unluckily remained for 
some time in the open air, and, overpowered by the effects of the 
liquor he had drunk, fell asleep. ... A fatal chill penetrated his 
bones ; he reached home with the seeds of a rheumatic fever al- 
ready in possession of his weakened frame. In this little accident, 
and not in the pressure of poverty or disrepute, or wounded feel- 
ings or a broken heart, truly lay the determining cause of the sadly 
shortened days of our national poet." 

How long this new access of extreme illness confined him 
seems uncertain. Currie says for about a week ; Chambers sur- 
mises a longer time. Mr. Scott Douglas says, that from the close 
of January till the month of April, he seems to have moved about 
with some hope of permanent improvement. But if he had such a 
hope, it was destined not to be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of 
January, 1796. to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so many con- 
fidences, this is the account he gives of himself: 

" I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn 
robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a dis- 
tance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pny the 
last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that 
shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheum- 
atic fever, and long the die spun doubtful ; until, after many weeks 
of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning 
to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my 



e 



BURNS. IIX 

own door in the street." In these words Burns would seem to have 
put his two attacks together, as though they were but one pro- 
longed illness. 

It was about this time that, happening to meet a neighbour in 
the street, the poet talked with her seriously of his health, and said 
among other things this : " I find that a man may live like a fool, 
but he will scarcely die like one." As from time to time he ap- 
peared on the street during the early months of 1796, others of his 
old acquaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slovenly 
appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be 
Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were 
still some flutters of song, one of which was, Hey for the Lass iuV 
a Tocher, written in answer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he 
was never to hear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle. 
in which he answers the inquiries of the colonel of his Volunteer 
Corps after his health. 

From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his room, and 
for a great part of each day was confined to bed. May came — a 
beautiful May — and it was hoped that its genial influences might 
revive him. But while young Jeffrey was writing, "it is the finest 
weather in the world — the whole country is covered with green and 
blossoms : and the sun shines perpetually through a light east wind," 
Burns was shivering at every breath of the breeze. At this crisis 
his faithful wife was laid aside, unable to attend him. But a young 
neighbour, Jessie Lewars, sister of a brother exciseman, came to 
their house, assisted in all household work, and ministered to the 
dying poet. She was at this time only a girl, but she lived to be a 
wife and mother, and to see an honoured old age. Whenever we 
think of the hist days of the poet, it is well to remember one who 
did so much to smooth his dying pillow. 

Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as usual 
found his vent in song. But the old manner still clung to him. 
Even then he could not express his gratitude to his young benefac- 
tress without assuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in 
this strain he addressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these 
it is told, that one morning the poet said to her that if she would 
play to him any favourite tune for which she desired to have new 
words, he would do his best to meet her wish. She sat down at 
the piano, and played over several times the air of an old song 
beginning thus : 

" The robin cam to the wren's nest, 
And keekit in, and keekit in." 

As soon as Burns had taken in the' melody, he set to, and in a 
few minutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the 
songs which he addressed to Jessie : 

" Oh ! wert thou in the cauld blast, 
On yonder lea, on yonder lea, 
My plaidie to the angry airt, 

I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. 



112 BURNS. 

Or did misfortune's bitter storms 

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, 

Thy bield should be my bosom, 
To share it a', to share it a'. 

" Or were I in the wildest waste, 

Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, 
The desert were a paradise, 

If thou wert there, if thou wert there: 
Or were I monarch o' the globe, 

Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, 
The brightest jewel in my crown 

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen." 

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that he 
composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite 
pathos. 

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline 
of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, " Many 
a merry meeting this publication (the Museum) has given us, and 
possibly it may give us more, though, alas ! I fear it. This pro- 
tracting, slow consuming illness will, I doubt much, my ever dear 
friend, arrest my sun before he has reached his middle career, and 
will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than study- 
ing the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment." On the clay 
on which he wrote these words, he left Dumfries for a lonely place 
called Brow, on the Solway shore, to try the effects of sea-bathing. 
He went alone, for his wife was unable to accompany him. While 
he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. Walter Riddel, to whom, 
after their estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be 
staying, for the benefit of her health, in the neighbourhood. She 
asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriage to bring him 
to her house. This is part of the account she gives of that inter- 
view : 

" I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The 
stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already 
touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was, ' Well, 
madam, have you any commands for the other world ? ' 1 replied 
that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there soonest, 
and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked 
in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern 
at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility. . . . We 
had a long and serious conversation about his present situation, 
and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He 
spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, 
but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen 
very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his 
four children so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly ex- 
pecting a fifth. He mentioned, with seeming pride and satisfaction, 
the promising genius of his eldest son, and the flattering marks of 
approbation he had received from his teachers, and dwelt particu- 



B UFA'S. 113 

larly on his hopes of that boy's future conduct and merit. His 
anxiety for his family seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more 
perhaps from the reflection that he had not done them all the jus- 
tice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from this subject, he 
showed great concern about the care of his literary fame, and par- 
ticularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said he 
was well aware that his death would create some noise, and that 
every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the in- 
jury of his future reputation; that his letters and verses written 
with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly 
wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle 
vanity or malevolence, when no dread of his resentment would re- 
strain them, or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice, or the 
insidious sarcasms of envy, from pouring forth all their venom to 
blast his fame. 

" He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons 
against whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he 
would be sorry to wound ; and many indifferent poetical pieces, 
which he feared would now. with all their imperfections on their 
head, be thrust upon the world. On this account he deeply re- 
gretted having deferred to put his papers in a state of arrangement, 
as he was now incapable of the exertion. . . . The conversation," 
she adds, "was kept up with great evenness and animation on his 
side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected. 
There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his 
sallies, and they would probably have had a greater share, had not 
the concern and dejection I could not disguise damped the spirit 
of pleasantry he seemed not unwilling to indulge. 

" We parted about sunset on the evening of that day (the 5th 
July, 1796) ; the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet 



no more 



1 •■ 



It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some anxiety 
about the literary legacy he was leaving to mankind. Not about 
his best poems ; these, he must have known, would take care of 
themselves. Yet even among the poems which he had published 
with his name, were some "which dying" he well might "wish to 
blot." There lay among his papers letters too, and other " fallings 
from him," which he no doubt would have desired to suppress, but 
of which, if they have not all been made public, enough have appeared 
to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not malevolence, which, 
after his death, would rake up every scrap he had written, uncaring 
how it might injure his good name, or affect future generations of 
his admirers. No poet perhaps has suffered more from the indis- 
criminate and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, catering too greedily 
for the public, than Burns has done. 

Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, had to 
bear another burden of care that pressed even more closely heme. 
To pain of body, absence from his wife and children, and haunting 
anxiety on their account, was added the pressure of some small 
debts and the fear of want. By the rules of the Excise, his full 



Ii 4 BURNS. 

salary would not be allowed him during his illness ; and though the 
Board agreed to continue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this 
in time to be comforted by it. With his small income diminished, 
how could he meet the increased expenditure caused by sickness ? 
We have seen how at the beginning of the year he had written to 
his friend Mitchell to ask the loan of a guinea. One or two letters, 
asking for the payment of some old debts due to him by a former 
companion, still remain. During his stay at Brow, on the 12th of 
July, he wrote to Thomson the following memorable letter : 

" After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels 
me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haber- 
dasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am 
dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. 
Do, for God's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. 
Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made 
me half distracted. 1 do not ask all this gratuitously ; for, upon return- 
ing health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five 
pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried 
my hand on Rothermurchie this morning. The measure is so 
difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines. 
They are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!" And on the 
other side was written Burns's last song, be'ginning, " Fairest maid, 
on Devon banks." Was it native feeling, or inveterate habit, that 
made him that morning revert to the happier days he had seen on 
the banks of Devon, and sing a last song to one of the two beauties 
he had there admired ? Chambers thinks it was to Charlotte 
Hamilton ; the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers. 

Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been much, 
but not justly, blamed for not having sent a much larger sum, and 
indeed for not having repaid the poet for his songs long before. 
Against such charges it is enough to reply that when Thomson had 
formerly volunteered some money to Burns in return for his songs, 
the indignant poet told him that if he ever again thought of such a 
thing, their intercourse must thenceforth cease. And for the small- 
ness of the sum sent, it should be remembered that Thomson was 
himself a poor man. and had not at this time made anything by his 
Collection of Songs, and never did make much beyond repayment 
of his large outlay. 

On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thomson he 
wrote another letter in much the same terms to his cousin, Mr. 
James Burns, of Montrose, asking him to assist him with ten pounds, 
which was at once sent by his relative, who, though not a rich, was 
a generous-hearted man. 

There was still a third letter written on that 12th of July (1796) 
from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for some months ceased her 
correspondence with him, the poet takes this affecting farewell : — 
" I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I 
would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I 
am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability 
will speedily send me beyond that 'bourn whence no traveller re. 



BURNS. uc 

turns.' Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured 
me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and 
especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining 
and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the 
seal ! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpi- 
tating heart. Farewell ! " 

On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the sea- 
bathing had eased his pains, it had not done anything to restore his 
health. The following anecdote of him at this time has been pre- 
served : — " A night or two before Bums left Brow, he drank tea 
with Mrs. Craig, widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered 
appearance excited much silent sympathy ; and the evening being 
beautiful, and the sun shining brightly through the casement, Miss 
Craig (afterwards Mrs. Henry Duncan) was afraid the light might 
be too much for him, and rose to let down the window-blinds. 
Barns immediately guessed what she meant, and regarding the 
young lady with a look of great benignity, said, 'Thank you, my 
dear, for your kind attention ; but oh ! let him shine : he will not 
shine long for me.' " 

On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dumfries in a 
small spring cart. When he alighted, the on-lookers saw that he 
was hardly able to stand, and observed that he walked with totter- 
ing steps to his door. Those who saw him enter his house, knew 
by his appearance that he would never again cross that threshold 
alive. When the news spread in Dumfries that Burns had returned 
from Brow and was dying, the whole town was deeply moved. 
Allan Cunningham, who was present, thus describes what lie saw: 
— " The anxiety of the people, high and low, was very great. 
Wherever two or three were together, their talk was of Burns, and 
of him alone. They spoke of his history, of his person, and of his 
works; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too 
early fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep feeling. 
All that he had done, and all that they had hoped he would accom- 
plish, were talked of. Half a dozen of them stopped Dr. Maxwell 
in the street, and said, ' How is Burns, sir? ' He shook his head, 
saying. ' He cannot be worse,' and passed on to be subjected to 
similar inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group in- 
quire, with much simplicity, ' Who do you think will be our poet 
now ? ' " 

During the three or four days between his return from Brow 
and the end, his mind, when not roused by conversation, wandered 
in delirium. Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old 
wit would for a moment return. To a brother volunteer who came 
to see him he said, with a smile, " John, don't let the awkward squad 
fire over me." His wife was unable to attend him ; and four help- 
less children wandered from room to room gazing on their unhappy 
parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was ministering to the help- 
less and to the dying one, and doing what kindness could do to re- 
lieve their suffering. On the fourth day after his return, the 21st 
of July, Burns sank into his last sleep. His children stood around 



n6 BURNS. 

his bed, and his eldest son remembered long afterwards all the cir. 
cumstances of that sad hour. 

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland 
like a knell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke 
up to feel the greatness of the gift which in him had been vouch- 
safed to their generation, and which had met, on the whole, with 
so poor a reception. Self-reproach mingled with the universal 
sorrow, as men asked themselves whether they might not have 
done more to cherish and prolong that rarely gifted life. 

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men of 
Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourn- 
ners, and soldiers and volunteers with colours, muffled drums, and 
arms reversed, not very appropriately mingled in the procession. 
At the very time when they were laying her husband in his grave, 
Mrs. Burns gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called 
Maxwell, after the physician who attended his father, but he died 
in infancy. The spot where the poet was laid was in a corner of 
St. Michael's churchyard, and the grave remained for a time un- 
marked by any monument. After some years his wife placed over 
it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribed with his name and age, and 
with the names of his two boys, who were buried in the same place. 
Well had it been, 4 if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in 
this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, 
though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly 
twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly, 
mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance 
from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with 
an ungraceful figure in marble, representing " The muse of 
Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring 
mantle over him." To this was added a long, rambling epitaph 
in tawdry Latin, as though any inscription which scholars could 
devise could equal the simple name of Robert Burns. When the 
new structure was completed, on the 19th September, 181 5, his 
grave was opened, and men for a moment gazed with awe on the 
form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the day when first it was 
laid in the grave. But as they began to raise it, the whole body 
crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and bones. These relics 
they bore to the mausoleum which had been prepared for their re- 
ception. But not even yet was the poet's dust to be allowed to 
rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, the mau- 
soleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband's side. 
Some craniologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name 
of so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhuman out- 
rage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 
1st of April, these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of 
Bums, u tried their hats upon it, and found them all too little ; " 
applied their compasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, 
and "satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to com- 
pose Tarn o' Shanter, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and To Mary 
in Heaven.''' This done, they laid the head once again in the hah 



jtcrtt^ni. 



U7 



lowed ground, where, let us hope, it will be disturbed no more. 
This mausoleum, unsightly though it is, has become a place of pil- 
grimage whither yearly crowds of travellers resort from the ends 
of the earth, to gaze on the resting-place of Scotland's peasant 
poet, and thence to pass to that other consecrated place within 
ruined Dryburgh, where lies the dust of a kindred spirit by his own 
Tweed. 



Il8 BUMS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights 
and the shadows of Burns's life, little comment need now be added. 
The reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here 
presented a better impression of the man as he was, in his strength 
and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been 
made to bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. 
Those who wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise 
and tender, should, turn to Mr. Carlyle's famous essay on Burns. 

What estimate is to be formed of Burns — not as a poet, but as 
a man — is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously 
answered, according to the principles men hold, and the tempera- 
ment they are of. Men cf the world will regard him one way, 
worshippers of genius in another; and there are many whom the 
judgments of neither of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to 
every one ; it is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had 
and the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful 
tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the 
original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort to see how this 
came to be. 

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endow- 
ments of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging 
sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as 
of the tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right 
and wrong which he had brought from a pure home — place all 
these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower 
nature, fierce and turbulent, filling him with wild passions which 
were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge — and between these two 
opposing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could overhear 
the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch 
such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what 
the end will be. From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and 
spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say 
which had the victory ? Among his countrymen there are many 
who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his genial tem- 
perament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects 
which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim hon- 



BURNS. 119 

our for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one of the 
best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonise 
Burns are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge 
the counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they 
cannot forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral de- 
fects it is ours to know ; it is not ours to judge him who had them. 

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland's 
saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. 
This claim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. 
The religion described by Burns in The Cotter's Saturday Night 
is, it should be remembered, his father's faith, not his own. The 
fundamental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in immor. 
tality, amid sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, and has 
forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his 
letters which goes beyond sincere deism — nothing which is in any 
way distinctively Christian. 

Even were his teaching of religion much fuller than it is, one 
essential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as 
a religious teacher, they not unreasonably expect that his practice 
should in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as an 
authority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In 
his Bard's Epitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took 
a far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics 
or panegyrists have done : 

" The poor inhabitant below 

Was quick to learn and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow 

And softer flame ; 
But thoughtless folly laid him low, 

And stained his name. 

" Reader, attend ! whether thy soul 
Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, 
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, 

In low pursuit ; 
Know, prudent, cautious self-control 

Is wisdom's root." 

" A confession," says Wordsworth, " at once devout, poetical, and 
human — a history in the shape of a prophecy." 

Leaving the details of his personal story, and — 

" Each unquiet theme, 
Where gentlest judgments may misdeem," 

it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to the 
world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish 
that we had known as little of the actual career of Burns as we do 
of the life of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to 
read his mind and character only by the light of his works ! That 



120 BURNS. 

poetry, though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what 
was best in the man ; and though his stream of song contains some 
sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, 
sunnily it flows ! how far the good preponderates over the evil ! 

What that good is must now be briefly said. To take his 
earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. 
Almost all the best of these are, with the one notable exception of 
Tarn O'Shanter, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces 
actually composed before he went to Edinburgh were included in 
later editions, but after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously ad- 
dressed himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kil- 
marnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and 
manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few 
lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse 
and the daisv, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the 
style and language, even that which is known as Burns's peculiar 
stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, 
and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two 
immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he 
felt himself indebted, and for them he always expresses a some- 
what exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show Burns's 
inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of 
those which he accepted as models. The old framework and 
metres which his country supplied, he took ; asked no other, no 
better, and into those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and 
such wine ! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic 
wine of Burns's poetry ? At the basis of all his power lay absolute 
truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he 
saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what 
Wordsworth recognised as Burns's leading characteristic. He 
who acknowledged few masters, owned Burns as his master in this 
respect when he speaks of him — 

" Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 
And showed my youth, 
How verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth." 

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his 
cottage, on society low and highland on nature homely or beautiful, 
with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest 
heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the 
sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he 
met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human 
existence ; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of 
books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with 
a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and 
forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made 
them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasms, 
rectless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare 



BURNS. I2I 

flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the 
strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the 
fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world's inequalities, 
and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the 
beginning, as has been said, " some bitterness of earthly spleen 
and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the 
end ate deep into the great heart they had long tormented," who 
that has not known his experience may venture too strongly to 
condemn him? 

This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested, 
itself in many ways. First. In the strength of it, he interpreted 
the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to 
whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before 
and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the 
Kilmarnock edition. The Cotter's Dog and the Laird's Dog are, 
as has been often said, for all their moralising, true dogs in all 
their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the 
poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters' lives, and 
their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between 
rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humor and 
power. No doubt it is done from the peasant's point of view. 
The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to 
them ; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and 
faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is 
represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the 
caustic wit is beginning to get to biting:, the edge of it is turned 
by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of 

" Some gentle master, 
Wha, aiblins thrang a-paiiiamentin, 
For Britain's guid his saul indentin — " 

Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies — 

" Haith, lad, ye little ken about it: 
For Britain's guid I — guid faith ! I doubt it. 
Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, 
An' saying aye or no 's they bid him : 

At operas an' plays parading* 

Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading : 

Or, may be, in a frolic daft, 

To Hague or Calais takes a waft, 

To make a tour an' tak a whirl, 

To learn bon ton, an' see the worl'. 

" Then, at Vienna or Versailles, 
He rives his father's auld entails; - 
Or by Madrid he takes the rout, 
To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt. 

***** 

For Britain's guid ! for her destruction! 
Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction." 



122 BURNS. 

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog — 

" Hech, man ! dear sirs! is that the gate 
They waste sae mony a braw estate ! 
Are we sae foughten and harass' d 
For gear to gang that gate at last ?" 

And yet he allows, that for all that 

"- Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, 

Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows." 

" Mark the power of that one word, ' nowt,' " said the late 
Thomas Aird. " If the poet had said that our young fellows went 
to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity 
in the thing, but think of his going all that way ' to fecht wi' nowt.' 
It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at 
once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly." 

Or turn to "the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the 
Ayrshire peasantry as they appear in their hours of merriment — 
painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of coun- 
try lads and lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time pre- 
served for ever the remembrance of antique customs and super- 
stitious observances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to 
fade, and have now all but disappeared. 

. Or again, take The auld Farmer's New- Year-morning Saluta- 
tion to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous 
poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, 
done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may 
seem a common-place, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, 
are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, 
see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough setting 
her face to the furzy braes. 

" Thou never braing't, an fetch't and fliskit, 
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, 
An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, 

Wi' pith an' pow'r, 
Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, 
An' slypet owre." 

To paraphase this, " Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, 
but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad 
thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth 
was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a 
cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over." The latter part 
of this paraphrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English 
words could have rendered these Stings as compactly and graphic- 
ally? 

Of The Cotter 's Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. 
As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The 



BURNS. 123 

metre was not native to him. It contains some lines that are 
feeble, whole stanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, 
in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such 
justice to the better nature that was originally in him. It shows 
how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however little 
he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for 
this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two 
great national poets has described Scottish character on the side 
of that grave, deep, though undemonstrative reverence, which has 
been an intrinsic element in it. 

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as 
perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathised with 
the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but 
he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, 
and this too in their own langn-ge, made musical and glorified by 
genius. He made the poorest j loughman proud of his station and 
his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He 
awoke a svmpathy for them in many a heart that otherwise would 
never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people 
have seen an impersonation of themselves on a large scale — of them- 
selves, both in their virtues and in their vices. 

Secondly. Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter of 
Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When 
he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue 
that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her 
Parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the re- 
moval of all symbols of her loyalty and nationality, had all but 
quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, 
and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. 
A race of literary men had sprung up in Edinburgh who, as (o 
national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing 
except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to 
be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans 
in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his sub- 
ject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that 
vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of 
long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his coun- 
trymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been 
strangers. 

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate; 
to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon the power of Yarrow, 
and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local ; 
the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wander- 
ings of Bruce he hoped to dramatise. His well known words about 
the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one 
of his strongest aspirations. And though he accomplished but a 
small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first 
of all that " the whole kingdom " has not wholly sunk into a pro- 
vince. If Scotchmen to-day love and cherish their country with a 
pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of 



124 



BURNS. 



all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in 
great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott after- 
wards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suf- 
fered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty 
"Df her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and 
manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left without her two 
"sacred poets." 

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to 
class nor country ; they had something more catholic in them, they 
reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of know- 
ing the characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what 
" random shots o' countra wit," did he hit off the public men of bis 
time! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how 
gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke ! The elder 
and the younger Pitt, ''yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he 
irreverently calls him — if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he 
could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scot- 
tish M.P.'s of the time, from — 

" That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas" 
to— 

That glib-gabbit Highland baron 

The Laird o' Graham," 
and — 

Erskinea spunkie Norlan billie," 

— he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been 
his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all 
ranks there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. 
Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. 
He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moral- 
iser ; but then his moralisings are not platitudes, but truths winged 
with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limitations — . 
his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. 
Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temper^ 
ament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it 
is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of 
moral insight, piercing to the quick ! what random sayings flung 
forth, that have become proverbs in all lands — " mottoes of the 
heart ! " 

Such are — > 

" O wad some power the giftie gie us, 
To see oursel as ithers see us : 
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 

An' foolish notion ; " 
Or the much-quoted — 

" Facts are chiels that winna ding 
And downa be disputed ; " 
Or— 

" The heart ay's the part ay 

That makes us right or wrang." 



BURNS. 



"5 



Who on the text, " He that is without sin among you, let him first 
cast a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Ad- 
dress to the unco Guid? and in his epistle of advice to a young 
friend, what wisdom ! what incisive aphorisms ! In passages like 
these scattered throughout his writings, and in some single poems, 
he has passed beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken 
home to the universal human heart. 

And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of 
human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began 
towards the end of last century, and which found utterance through 
Cowper first of the English poets, there has been no voice in liter- 
ature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than 
Burns. And then his humanity was not confined to man, it over- 
flowed to his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, 
the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long 
been household words. In this tenderness towards animals we see 
another point of likeness between him and Cowper. 

Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same 
clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of 
nature is intense, but very simple and direct, no subtleisings, nor 
refinings about it, nor any of that nature-worship which soon after 
his time came in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into 
the outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sympathy. 
Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being 
independent of man, but as the background of his pictures of life 
and human character. How true his perceptions of her features are, 
how pure and transparent the feeling she awakens in him ! Take 
only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the 
burn in his Halloween — 

" Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, 
As thro' the glen it wimpl't; 
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, 

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; 
Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, 

Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle ; 
Whyles cookit underneath the braes, 
Below the spreading hazel, 

Unseen that night." 

Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described ? The next 
verse can hardly be omitted — 

" Amang the brachens on the brae, 

Between her and the moon, 

The deil, or else an outler quey, 

Gat up an' gae a croon : 
Poor Leezie's heart maist lap the hool ; 

Near fav'rock height she jumpit ; 
But miss'd a fit, an' in the pool 
Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, 

Wi' a plunge that night." 



126 BURA r S. 

" Maist iap the hool," what condensation in that Scotch phrase J 
The hool is the pod of a pea — poor Lizzie's heart almost leapt out 
of its encasing sheath. 

Or look at this other picture : 

" Upon a simmer Sunday morn, 
When Nature's face is fair, 
I walked forth to view the corn, 

And snuff the caller air. 
The risin' sun owre Galston muirs 

Wi' glorious light was glintin; 
The hares were hirplin down the furrs, 
The lav'rocks they were chantin 

Fu' sweet that day." 

I have noted only some of the excellences of Burn's poetry, 
which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary 
to speak; they are too obvious, and whatever is gross, readers can 
of themselves pass by. 

Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, 
were almost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is 
however, one memorable exception. Tarn d 1 Shanter, as we have 
seen, belongs to Ellisland days. Most of his earlier poems were 
entirely realistic, a transcript of the men and women scenes he had 
seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very 
slightly idealised. But in Tarn o' Shanter he had let loose his 
powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them 
he shaped a tale which was a pure imaginative creation. In no 
other instance, except perhaps in The Jolly Beggars, had he done 
this ; and in that cantata, if the genius is equal, the materials are 
so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dra- 
matic power, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite 
judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tarn <?' Sha?i~ 
ter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have been written "all but 
quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed 
talent; that it is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhet- 
oric ; the heart of the story still lies hard and dead." On the 
other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict : " In the 
inimitable tale of Tam o' Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evi- 
dence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the awful and 
even the horrible. No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, 
ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discord- 
ant emotions with such rapid transitions. His humorous descrip- 
tion of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific : 
and the witches' dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous 
and horrible." Sir Walter, I believe, is right, and the world has 
sided with him in his judgment about Tam 0' Shanter. Nowhere 
in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to be found so 
much of the power of which Scott speaks — that of combining in 
rapid transition almost contradictory emotions — if we except per* 



BURNS. 



127 



haps one of Scott's own highest creations, tne tale of Wandering 
Willie, in Redgauntht. 

On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few 
sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes 
out fullest, freest, brightest ; it is as a song-writer that his fame 
has spread widest, and will longest last. Mr, Carlyle, not in his 
essay, which does full justice to Burns's songs, but in some more 
recent work, has said something like this, " Our Scottish son of 
thunder had, for want of a better, to pour his lightning through 
the narrow cranny of Scottish song — the narrowest cranny ever 
vouchsafed to any son of thunder." The narrowest, it may be, 
but the most effective, if a man desires to come close to his fellow- 
men, soul to soul. Of all forms of literature the genuine song is 
the most penetrating, and the most to be remembered ; and in 
this kind Burns is the supreme master. To make him this, two 
things combined. First, there was the great background of national 
melody and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, 
and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was cradled 
in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could have sung so 
well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned more 
feelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of 
his country, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their un- 
known graves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied 
eagerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were such, 
that had come down to him from the past, treasured everv scrap of 
antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had 
them by heart. This was the one form of literature that he had 
entirely mastered. And from the first he had laid it down as a 
rule, that the one way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true 
fervour of song, was, as he phrased it, " to sowth the tune over and 
over," till the words came spontaneously. The words of his own 
songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not composed first, and 
set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient 
songs and outward melody would have gone for nothing, but for 
the second element, that is the inward melody born in the poet's 
deepest heart, which received into itself the whole body of national 
song: and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth 
ennobled and glorified by his own genius. 

That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar intensity of 
his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibility, the headlong 
passion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond 
that of other men. How mysterious to reflect that the same quali- 
ties on their emotional side made him the great songster of the 
world, and on their practical side drove him to ruin ! The first 
word which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner 
on the harvest-rig ; the last utterance he breathed in verse was 
also a song — a faint remembrance of some former affection. Be- 
tween these two he composed from two to three hundred. It 
might be wished, perhaps, that he had written fewer, especially 
fewer love songs ; never composed under pressure, and only when 



128 BLfRArS. 

his heart was so full lie could not help singing. This is the condi- 
tion on which alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably 
from thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come 
up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writer could 
show above four or five of the same quality. Of his songs one 
main characteristic is that their subjects, the substance they lay 
hold of, belongs to what is most permanent in humanity, those 
primary affections, those permanent relations of life which cannot 
change while man's nature is what it is. In this they are wholly 
unlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. 
As the phrases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no 
time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they 
are rooted in the primary strata, which are steadfast. Then, as 
the subjects are primary, so the feeling with which Burns regards 
them is primary too — that is, he gives us the first spontaneous 
gush — the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, 
manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in the reflective 
faculty, and there artistically shaped — not subtilised and refined 
away till it has lost its power and freshness; but given at first 
hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his best, you 
seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally 
as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, 
till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No one else had so 
much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white 
heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most 
perfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back 
upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in 
Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form is as 
perfect as the inward music is all pervading, and the two are in 
complete harmony. 

To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate 
and consummate expression to fundamental human emotions, four 
songs may be mentioned, in each of which a different phase of love 
has been rendered for all time — 

" Of a' the airts the wind can blaw," 

" Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon," 

" Go fetch to me a pint o' wine ; " 

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy 
love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically — 

" John Anderson, my Jo, John." 

Then for comic humour of courtship, there is— 

" Duncan Gray cam here to woo." 



BURNS. 129 

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's troubles, yet 
keeps " aye a heart aboon them a'," we have — 

" Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair." 

For frendship rooted in the past, there is — 

" Should auld acquaintance be forgot," 

even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses. 

For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of finer feel- 
ing, there is Macpherson's Farewell. For patriotic heroism — 

" Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled ; " 

and fcr personal independence, and sturdy, if self-asserting, man- 
hood — 

" A man's a man for a' that." 

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which 
Burns has given such consummate expression, as will stand for all 
time. 

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so 
greatly to the honour of Burns. He was emphatically the purifier 
of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also 
a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never 
written. But we who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly 
imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melo- 
dies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to com- 
pare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish songs published 
by David Herd, in 1769, a few years before Burns appeared. A 
genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of, the late Thomas 
Aird, has said, " Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong 
though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their 
very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent 
words to which many of them had long been set. How was the 
plague to be stayed ? All the preachers in the land could not divorce 
the grossness from the music. The only way was to put something 
better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns 
gave us." 

So purified and ennobled by Bums, these songs embody human 
emotion in its most condensed and sweetest essence. They appeal 
to all ranks, they touch all ages, they cheer toil-worn men under 
every clime. VVherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the 
suns of India, amid African deserts, on the western prairies of 
America, among the squatters of Australia, whenever men of Brit- 
ish blood would give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial 
feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and 
find in them at once a perfect utterance, and a fresh tie of brother- 
hood. It is this which forms Burns's most enduring claim on the 
world's gratitude. 



ENOCH MOEGAN'S SONS' 




SAPOLIO 



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WINDOWS. 
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KNIVES. 

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LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



165. Eyre's Acquittal 10 

106. 20.000 Leagues Under 

the Sea, by Verne... .20 

167. Anti-Slavery Days... .20 

168. Beauty's Daughters.. .20 

169. Beyond the Sunrise. . . .20 

170. Hard Times, Dickens .20 

171. Tom Cringle's Log... .20 

172. Vanity Fair 

173. Underground Russia. .20 

174. Middleniarch, Eliot.. .20 
Do., Part II 20 

175. Sir Tom, Mrs Oiiphant .20 

176. Pel nam, by Lytton. . . .20 

177. The Story of Ida 10 

tidcap Violet, Biack .20 

179. The Little Pilgrim 10 

180. Kilmeny, by Black... .20 

181. Whist or BumUle- 

rjuppy? 10 

182. The Beautiful Wretch .20 

183. Her Mother's Sin 20 

en Pastures and 
Piccadilly, Biack ... .20 

185. The Mysterious Island .15 

Do., Part II 15 

Do., Part III 15 

186. Tom Browa at Oxford .15 

Part II 15 

nicker thau Water . . .20 

188. In Silk Attire, Blac 

189. Scottish Chiefs, P't I.. 20 
Do., Part II 

190. Willy Reillv, Carleton .20 

191. The Nautz Family 

192. Great Expectations... .20 

193. Pendennis, Thackeray .20 
Do., Part II 

194. Widow Bedott Pap. 

195. Daniel Deronda, Eliot. .20 
Do., Part I i 

196. AltioraPeto, Ciipoant .20 

197. By the Gate of the Sea .15 

198. Tales of a Traveller.. .20 

199. Life and Voyages of 

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200. The Pilgrim's Progress .20 

201. Martin Chuzzlewit. .. .20 
Do., Part II 20 

202. Theophrastus Such ... .10 

203. Disarmed, M. Edwards .15 

204. Eugene Aram, Lytton .20 

205. The Spanish Gypsy 

and Other Poems 20 

206. Cast Up by the Sea. . . .20 

207. Mill on the Floss, P't I .15 
Do. (Eliot), Part II 15 

208. Brother Jacob, Eliot. .10 

209. The Executor 20 

210. American Notes 15 

211. The Newcomes, Part I .20 
Do.,PartII ,. .. .20 

212. The Privateersman. , . .20 

213. The Three Feathers. .20 

214. Phantom Fortune 20 

215. Red Eric, Ballantyne. .20 

216. Lady Silverdale'a 

Sweetheart, Black. . . .10 



217. The Four Macnicols. .10 261 

218. Mr. Plsistratus Brown .10 268. 

219. Dombey & Son, Part I 20 
Do., Part II 20 

220. Book of Snobs 10 

221. Grimm's Fairy Tales.. .20 

lie Disowned, Lytton .20 

223. Little Dorrit, Dickens. .20 
Do., Partll 20 

224. Abbotsford and New- 
stead Abbey, Irving. .10 

225. Oliver Goldsmith 10 

lie Fire Brigade 20 

227. Rifle and Hound in 

Ceylon 20 

228. Our Mutual Friend ... .20 
Do. Part II 20 

229. Paris Sketches .15 

230. Belinda, Broughton... .20 

231. Nicholas Nickleby 20 

Do., Part II 90 

232 Monarch Mincing Lane .20 

233. Eight Years Wander- 

ing in Ceylon, Baker .20 

234. Pictures from Italy 15 

235. Adventures of Philip. .15 
Do.,PartLT 15 

236. Knickerbocker His- 

tory of New York .. . .20 

237. The Boy at Mugby 10 

238. The Virginians, P't I. .20 
Do., Part ii...- 20 

239. Erling the Bold 20 

240. Kenelm Chillingly SO 

241. Deep Down 20 

242. Samuel Brohl & Co. . . .20 

243. Gautran, byFarjeon.. .20 

244. Bleak House, Part I.. .20 
Do., Part II 20 

245. What Will He Do Wi' It .20 
Do, Partil .20 

246. Sketches of Young 

Couples 10 

247. Devereux, Lytton 20 f 

ie of Webster, 2 pts. .30 

249. The Crayon Papers... .20 

250. TheCaxtons, Lytton. .15 
Do, Part H 15 

251. Autobiography of An- 

thony Trollope .20 

252. Critical Reviews, by 

ikeray 10 

253. Lucretia, Lytton, P't I .20 

254. Peter, the Whaler 20 

255. Last of the Barons.. .15 
Do., Part II 15 

256. Eastern Sketches 15 

257. All in a Garden Fair. .20 

258. File No. 113, Gaboriau .20 

259. The Parisians, Lytton. .20 
Do., Part II 20 

260. Mrs. Darling's Letters, .20 

261. Master Humphrey'3 

Clock 10 

262. Fatal Boots, Thackr'y .10 

263. The Alhambra, Irving .15 

264. The Four Georges. .. .10 

265. Plutarch's Lives, 5 pts 1.00 



270. 
271. 

272. 
273. 
274. 

275. 
276. 

377. 
278. 
279. 
280. 
281. 
282. 

283. 
284. 
285. 

287. 
288. 



289. 
290. 
291. 

292. 
293. 
294. 
295. 
296. 
297. 

298. 



300. 

301. 

302. 
303. 
304. 
305. 
306. 
307. 
308. 

309. 

310. 

312. 
313. 
314. 
315. 
316. 

317. 
318. 

319. 
320. 
321 



266. Under the Red Flag. . . .10 I 322 



The Haunted House. . .10 
When the Ship Conies 

Home 10 

One False, both Fair. . .20 

Mudf og Papers 10 

My Novel, by Butwer- 

Ly tton. 3 parts 60 

Conquest of Granada.. .20 

Sketches by Boz 20 

A Christmas Carol 15 

lone Stewart, Linton . . .20 
Harold, Lytton, Parti .15 

Do., Part II 15 

Dora Thome , 20 

Maid of Athens 20 

The Conquest of Spain .10 

Fitzboodle Papers 10 

Bracebridsje Hall 20 

The Uncommercial 

Traveler 20 

Roundabout Papers... .20 
Rossmoyne, Duchess. .20 
A Legend of the Rhine .10 

Cox's Diary 10 

Beyond Pardon, 20 

Somebody's Luggage, 
and Mrs. Lirnper's 

Lodgings 10 

Godolphin, Lytton 20 

Salmagundi, Irving 20 

Famous Funny Fel- 
lows, Clemens 20 

Irish Sketches 20 

The Battle of Life 10 

Pilgrima of the Rhine .15 
Random Shots, Adeler .20 

Men's Wives 10 

Mystery of Edwin 

Drood, by Dickens. . . .20 
Reprinted Pieces from 

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Astoria, by W. Irving. .20 
Novels by Eminent 

Hands 10 

Spanish Voyages 20 

No Thoroughfare 10 

Character Sketches... .10 

Christmas Books .20 

A Tour on the Prairies ,10 
Ballads of Thackeray . . .15 
Yellowplush Papers. . . .10 
Life of Mahomet, P't I .15 

Do., Part II 15 

Sketches and Travels 
in London, Thack'ray .10 

Life of Goldsmith 2( 

Capt. Bonneville 2( 

Golden Girls, Alan Muir .2( 
English Humorists .. . .1! 
Moorish Chronicles. .. .1( 

Winifred Power 2( 

Great Hoggarty Dia- 
mond 1* 

Pausanias, Lytton 1! 

The New Abelard 2< 

A Real Queen. ... ... . . .2 

The Rose and the Ring .2 
. Wolfert'sRooet,L?ving .1 
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